Re: Jabber BOF afterthoughts

I am speaking as the person who chaired the Jabber BOF. I should note 
that I have no personal interest in seeing it go forward.
On 7/18/02 at 6:18 PM +0300, aki(_dot_)niemi(_at_)nokia(_dot_)com wrote:

> 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.
That was part of the objective. However, the Jabber community has a 
good deal more work to do on the XMPP protocol and wants not only a 
place to publish and get review, but a place to do that work. In 
addition, they need some organizational structure to get that work 
moving forward; the IETF seemed to them a good place to get that 
structure.
> 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.
As was stated at the IESG plenary, it was absolutely clear to most of 
us that the folks in the room were perfectly willing to release 
change control. It was indicated that some people in the Jabber 
community might offer resistance to that idea, but that all of the 
main players were on board and the others could "be convinced". I'm 
at a loss to understand how people heard this differently.
> 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.
This is OK insofar as it goes, but what's the point? The protocol 
needs work, the people currently working on the protocol wish to 
improve it, especially with regard to security and 
internationalization, and they are willing to work in the IETF. Why 
shouldn't we just get them to Proposed Standard inside a working 
group?
If the only purpose of the Jabber folks was to publish what they've 
got, then Informational is correct. But that's not what's going on.
> 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.
It seems to me that the IESG doesn't need additional work like this. 
At least if a WG were formed, a WG chair and the rest of the IETF 
would have a chance to review this document before it got to the IESG.
> 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 don't remember this response, but as far as I know, it is simply 
incorrect, for the reasons you noted among others. Perhaps this was a 
response to publishing it as a Propsed Standard without having a 
working group? That might encounter the problem, leaving aside the 
issue of whether it should.
> 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. ;)
But what do we do with the folks who *want* to be assimilated? 
Anyway, given that they actually want to get work done under the 
auspices of the IETF, I see no justification for turning them away.
pr
--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated