From: Ofer Inbar <cos(_at_)ne(_dot_)cohesive(_dot_)com>
"If farmers can be paid not to grow wheat, why can't IETF
WGs be paid not to develop protocols?"
We can. Just go work for a company that is willing to send you to
IETF on their time & money, and wants you to disrupt certain IETF
protocol work. I'm sure many of us have witnessed this in action, and
we've probably missed some of the more subtle and skilled efforts. It
most assuredly does happen. My epiphany on this subject came during a
session of the HTML 3.0 working group, circa 1994. I don't think it's
an accident that that WG effort did not produce a standard, although
of course I can't prove anything about anyone's intent at the time.
The official dogma of every Standards Process is that the Process has
failed if it does not produce a document. In real life, no document
is more often a success a failure. On the other side of the coin, a
committee document is more often a failure than a success. This side
is trivially proven for the IETF by referring to the RFC index.
Of course, every Standards Process defines producing any document as
success, while the real world defines standards success as first improving
interoperability and a distant second as advancing the state of the art.
Those of us with toeholds in the real world know that official standards
are as often used (and even intentionally) to harm as to help
interoperability. 100VG-AnyLAN is a classic case study of a painfully
obviously broken protocol flogged through a Standards Process to a de
jure standard when the technical and business situation was clear even
before the shenanigans that started the IEEE 802 subcommittee (e.g. the
representative of 802.3 not passing along the vote and even consensus
of 802.3).
(I'm pointing at an infamous IEEE boondoggle to minimize offending IETF
participants and not because there are no IETF examples.)
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com