Christian,
we might be looking through opposite ends of this tunnel.....
--On 16. oktober 2003 15:15 -0700 Christian Huitema
<huitema(_at_)windows(_dot_)microsoft(_dot_)com> wrote:
I think this point is one of the critical causes of conflict when
talking
about the IETF mission - and unless we lance the boil, actually talk
about
it, and attempt to *resolve* the issue, we will go on revisiting the
issue
forever, with nothing but wasted energy to show for it.
Well, to paraphrase a well known leader, "the IETF, how many divisions?"
The gist of this comment is that someone developing a network
application protocol ought to somehow get a blessing from the IETF.
Reality check. Who got the IETF approval to deploy ICQ, Kazaa, or for
that matter HTTP?
For application protocols, I view it in the opposite direction - if someone
comes to the IETF and *asks* for the IETF's advice, blessing or ownership,
what are the conditions under which we say "yes"? Or "no"?
For those that never ask, and never become important, I say "not my
problem". The number of application protocols with the oomph to "break" the
Internet is quite small - offhand, I'd say that HTTP/1.0 probably was the
closest try.
If the Internet is so fragile that a poorly developed application can
break it, then the IETF response should not be to try control each
application. It has to be, design checks that can be implemented by
cooperating hosts and routers so that their neck of the Internet is in
good health!
Now there's an idea..... :-)
The flipside is of course with those things that are *already* under IETF
control, or critical for our infrastructure, for some reason. The
abstracted version of the fights over MIME types, URI schemes, SIP
extension etcetera seems to be "don't extend until you've talked to us
about what you're doing, and if we don't like it, don't try to pretend that
we did" (the P-headers, vnd. MIME types and the proposed faceted URI
schemes); I'm not certain what the abstracted version of the fights over
COPS, CR-LDP, RSVP-TE and so on are.....
The IETF has got fewer divisions than the Pope, of course. Anyone is free
to ignore us. And we need to remember that, sometimes.