Hi Aki -
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.
Hmmm ... I was at that BOF and heard a very different message. On change
control, I heard "yes, we want to
release change control to the IETF" repeated many times. That question was
thrust at the presenters repeatedly,
and the answer each time was a consistent "yes."
I also heard that there were quite a few things that people felt should be
worked on. I think security was
brought up first, and it seemed to me that the discussions were so heated that
perhaps there wasn't time for
measured discussion as to the other things.
So, while I agree that informational RFCs are one way to go, I also heard a
group of developers both
within the IETF and some that are new to the IETF wanting to do some work on
asynchronous message
passing in XML. I know that development of those mechanisms will be quite
useful for the work that
I do and I suspect that is the case for quite a few other people. This
certainly isn't a rubber-stamp,
"get the IETF imprint" effort, and a working group makes perfect sense to me.
The protocol is mature in
some respects, but there is still quite a bit of work to do and it is the kind
of work we do in the
IETF. The Jabber developers certainly shouldn't be penalized for having
working code and real users.
Regards,
Carl