Vinton,
I bow to your position. We once had offices very close to each other.
Remember MCI Mail?
I am surprised you're back with MCI or whatever.
But...
Having quietly listened to what's being said, who's saying it, and where they
are ...
I am reading email from some good thinkers, obviously good people, not quite
open source gnomes, but close. What's in it for me, or the world? Obviously
IETF picks some pretty nice places to meet. And it is a pretty impressive
org to work with to pretend to care about making a difference. Hey, if you're
in academia and want to eat, you'd better get some corporate funding. Where do
we go from here? Eating good. Unemployment bad.
Well OK, what's best? What's acceptable? What keeps people employed? Bottom
up? Start with the itsy-bitsy, bit-by-bit lower level protocol bits and
bytes and try to complete the Tower of Babel (which by the way I think was in
Iraq), or take an Alan Turing type deep thinking approach that no employing
company can or will afford? (I wonder why he ate an apple spiced with
cyanide?)
OK.
Here's the point more specifically. Considering the DEEP ISSUES people are
beginning to discuss ( OK you do recognize them as deep issues right?) IETF is
at a crossroad. A "paradigm shift" from within is not possible. Not given
the funding employers. Or the controlling employers. Do you have the chutzpah
or the intellectual purity to see the future beyond your next pay check? Or,
is this beyond the IETF, which I suspect is the case. Or do we just wait for
the Tower to complete and buy a farm in Montana?