Here is my two cents worth on the subject. As all of you know there are many
oversight bodies. One of the great aspects and advantage of IETF is the free
flow of ideas and the freedom it allows for implementations. There are
methods already in place to change specifications. As the proverbial saying
goes; "if someone invents a better mouse trap" they can submit a DRAFT RFC
for consideration.
Another point to consider is while, oversight bodies start of with good
intentions, it gets bogged in turf wars and internal fiefdoms over time. The
same violators starts influencing the outcome, usually the big guys that are
breaking or violating implementation specs today at the expense of the
little guys. This will eventually kill the spirit and workings of IETF as we
know today.
Pall
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org [mailto:owner-ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org]On
Behalf Of Camile
Howe
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 4:39 AM
To: George Michaelson; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Cc: 'st(_dot_)amour(_at_)isoc(_dot_)org'; leslie(_at_)thinkingcat(_dot_)com;
Harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no;
klensin+iab(_at_)jck(_dot_)com
Subject: IAB/ISOC not IETF Charter Re: What is at stake? Re: IP: Microsoft
breaks Mime specification
Obviously standards non-conformance abuse by industry
is "major concern" of IETF members, 'cause I haven't
seen this type of "chat-discussion" email (over 100)
since TCP.
Would expect that it is an ISOC & IAB joint "internet
management/oversight" decision as to how we implement
industry conformance oversight. Believe most IETF
members agree that there would be (industry) incentive
to follow an "internet compliant" certification
program. If implemented properly (& inexpensive enough
for the little guys, perhaps $scaled to business size)
would most definitely ease the quantity of offenders.
IETF members will gladly assist in the process
development of IETF Protocol standards compliance
methodology. Below is one possible(high-level) method
of implementation.
Per the mass/chat-mail discussion...
The IETF is not an oversight/management org of
Internet.
That is the IABs charter. Policing corporations'
standards implementations
surely is beyond our scope (& $..ha!).
IETF is to engineer/develop standard protocols.
It seems quite appropriate that our IETF chairman
denounce any product known (proven by any IESG member)
to deviate from an IETF standard, in the event that
the deviation will/might impede the Internet's
operation or performance. However, this is risky
since in all probability will have a very negative
effect... media and politics in the development of
standards is bad business. Remember that is why we
segregated domain naming. Publicity breads political
intervention and inevitably limits innovative
development.
Believe this area should be the IAB's charter. Since
most of us discover short-coming of products during
our own employment endeavors, we should establish a
new procedure that facilitates us to provide
standard-offensive data (perhaps an impact rating
scheme), by which the appropriate working group can
independently validate and pass on to our chairman...
better yet...
the IAB (or even ISOC since it a profit/fee org). This
would give our spokesman/representative what is
required to make such a "damning" non-conforming
statement.
As far as certification of any standard. Again, it is
not the IESG charter, however it is would be
appropriate for the IAB to approve certain "test
centers" to perform validation/certification
endorsement on behalf of the IAB. Most large
companies, Sun, MS, IBM etc have the same sort of
program. The IAB then gets a percentage of what the
"test center" makes. Could be the most cost-effective
way to implement policing world-wide. The IAB could
be our public voice as well.
Camile
PS A quote from the IAB...
"Another fuzzy boundary is "how far up or down do we
go?" With the international political drive for
information superhighways, the IAB is expecting the
Internet to become the infrastructure for the
"Information Infrastructure." Does this mean that
every information handling protocol must be developed
by the IETF? Certainly not!"
http://www.iab.org/connexions.html
--- George Michaelson <ggm(_at_)apnic(_dot_)net> wrote:
We'll know when the Internet 'matters' on this
measure, when they
take the management and oversight away from the
IETF.
...
Hrm,
SoUL = Software Underwriters Laboratories
but I thought the UL was a distinct company in it self
that other
companies
send stuff to for testing.
So some one withe means and clout in the industy needs
to take it up.
Suppose could put of a website like
http://www.underwriters.org...
hrm
www.sul.org
and gear it as a contact point for software testing.
At 10:08 AM 1/23/02 -0600, Alex Audu wrote:
Great idea, but you also should not leave out the
issue of compliance
testing.
May be an organization like
the Underwriters Laboratories,..or some other newly
formed group
(opportunity,.. anyone?) could take
up the role of compliance testing.
Regards,
Alex.
Franck Martin wrote:
I support the idea, what needs to be done is the
IETF to come with a
trademark and someone to Inform the ISOC about all
this discussion
and also
to register this trademark...
Lynn, Could you please read this thread from the
IETF archives, it
could be
interesting for the development of ISOC/IETF.
Franck Martin
Network and Database Development Officer
SOPAC South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission
Fiji
E-mail: franck(_at_)sopac(_dot_)org <mailto:franck(_at_)sopac(_dot_)org>
-----Original Message-----
From: Kyle Lussier [mailto:lussier(_at_)autonoc(_dot_)com]
Sent: Wednesday, 23 January 2002 4:04
To: Donald E. Eastlake 3rd; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: IP: Microsoft breaks Mime
specification
We need stronger enforcement of the RFC's, and we
need creative
thinking as to how to go about that. I like the
idea of an easy
in "IETF Certified" trademark, if you abuse it, it
can be revoked,
and then vendors building contracts around
supporting IETF Certified
products.
It gives CIOs something to rattle about as well.
I.e., they
can require IETF Certification of products, which
guarantees them
standards support, as enforced by the IETF
community.
Just a simple precise trademark construct, with an
"easy-in"
application that costs maybe $100 per product, and
supported
by the IETF. That certification could be revoked
down the road.
IETF doesn't have to be a conformance body or
litigator. It just
merely needs to be the bearer of the "one true
mark" :).
Kyle Lussier
AutoNOC LLC
----------------
...
keith - may i refer you to don eastlake's earlier
reply? viz., the
existing
system is quite effective because products that
don't play by the
concensus
rules have a much harder time thriving or even
surviving.
sometimes this works. as a generalization, it doesn't
hold up.
Just to pick a small example: MIME has been out
for nearly 10 years
and
I'm still receiving, on a daily basis, MIME
attachments that are
unreadable because they lack proper content-type
labelling.
That's not what I would call "effective".
then ignore it or fix it. obviously, the pain isn't
at the point
where it
bothers you... for myself, the program that handles
my incoming mail
dumps
MIME-bad stuff into an audit file and then ignores
it. if it was
"important", then whoever sent it can get on the
phone... in doing
this for
the last 10 years, i've yet to suffer a mishap
because of this...
that kind of solution is easy for you or me.
unfortunately, it doesn't
scale to a user base of 100s of millions of people
that's trying to use
email to ship around attachments and wondering why
they don't work.
...
Keith
...One common way for an idea to be half-baked is for
it to utterly fail
to
consider the needs of some constituency or another.
As the Internet
has become larger and more diverse our organization
has also become
fragmented, its participants representing very diverse
interests.
Probably
for this reason it's become fairly common for working
groups to produce
results that are half-baked in this way. Throwing
such half-baked
ideas
to the marketplace usually hasn't resulted in
refinement, but it has
resulted in harm to the Internet's ability to support
new applications.
And by the time the harm is understood, it's way too
late to kill the
bad idea.
As for making non-conformance public, I would very
much like to see
that happen. Whether IETF is in a good position to do
this is a
different
question. Since (perhaps unfortunately) most of
IETF's energy comes
from
vendors who pay their employees to work within IETF
working groups, and
some of those same vendors have reputations for
producing dangerously
non-conformant implementations, I think it puts IETF
in a precarious
position if it starts pointing fingers at the vendors
who produce such
things
Keith
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