Hi Folks,
I happened to be at the Jabber BOF, which since has turned out to be a hot
topic, at least judging from the discussions at the IESG plenary. As far as I
understood, the objectives of the Jabber community were, that they mainly
wanted a place for the protocol documentation to be published, and needed some
expert review and help in sorting out the security services for the protocol. I
didn't see an overwhealming desire to release the control for the development
of the protocol to the IETF, but I may have misinterpreted things.
My perhaps a rather simplistic suggestion at the BOF was that the Jabber
community submit their protocol specifications to the IESG to be published as
Informational RFCs. After an addmittedly quick skim through the I-Ds, in my
opinion they seemed to describe a pretty mature protocol which arguably works.
And my understanding of the IETF process has also been that the IESG does
commit to a fairly thorough review for even documents intended as
Informational, i.e., give expert review, possibly referring to relevant WGs in
the process.
The answer to this suggestion at the BOF was, that the Informational would get
blocked because of an existing IETF WG working on the same area of Instant
Messaging and Presence. I was surprised to see that this same issue didn't seem
to block a Standards Track approach.
Why is that? After all, the Informational RFC should work equally well for the
Jabber community, and would even allow them to retain control for the
development of the protocol. I understand the Internet Relay Chat is in fact
Informational, but that doesn't seem to have hampered its adoption in the
Internet.
My point finally is, that perhaps the IETF should embrace these entrant
application layer protocols as Informational RFCs, rather than applying the "we
will assimilate you" paradigm to them. ;)
Cheers,
Aki