On Sat, 7 May 2005, Tom Lord wrote:
>> it's not that cut-and-dried. it can be very costly to users to
>> let the market decide. sometimes the market doesn't decide, it
>> just fragments.
>
> So?
so "let the market decide" is a lousy rule. there's no justification
for it. it's just the sort of thing that someone says when he fears
competition from a better product.
I agree with Keith. But how about:
"So... We all work very hard to create standards using a
vendor-neutral, open process that work for many parties, not
just a single vendor"
The original focus of IETF was to create and firm-up the Internet.
That war was won.
The internet evolves. New standards are created. Old standards are
modified. That process doesn't stop.
But if you aren't interested, why are you here? What's your interest? I
don't understand your point. Are you here to convince the rest of us that
the IETF is irrelevant? The IETF will "end" when people lose interest in
its works.
You're complaining that some application-layer stuff like IM isn't as orderly
as you'd like.
Disorder isn't good for the users, either. Its not just a personal view of
orderliness. And it isn't good for the market to have such unnecessary and
gratuitous disorder. That's why standards of any form exist.
I don't see the connection between your complaint and the original
focus.
Now, refining a few core protocols -- that'd be great. Trying to be
the government of all protocols -- huh?
The SRFI process, in the world of Scheme programming, seems to me the
more utilitarian approach to working on higher-level protocols: there's
nearly nothing to fight over in that process.
I suspect that the architecture of Scheme and Lisp has a lot to do with
this. You have a few core language constructs and everything else is
built on top of that. Try to take away CAR or CDR and you'd have big
problems with consensus, I suspect. Better examples is the Common
Lisp/Scheme schism. There can easily be many languages, but its harder to
say there will be multiple BGP or TCP variants. Some order, beyond the
"you're welcome to create a code fork" is necessary when you have
different pieces of hardware that have to interoperate. A program only
needs its particular runtime, and we can easilly have many runtimes for
different languages. If you were making scheme/lisp hardware, there would
be more concern about the compatibility of language primitives. (Didn't we
already have this battle with LMI and Symbolics?) So I don't think the
Scheme programming analogy works.
But I agree that the "consensus" is a vague term. Most of the people who
don't like it are the ones where the consensus didn't go their way. In
any specific case, its hard to tell whether they have a valid complaint or
not. I agree that's a problem. And partly because the definition and
determination of "consensus" is so vague, there is sometimes genuine cause
for suspicions about motives, politics, and such. However, putting
together a simple voting process won't work either. Like democracy, its
just about the worst thing there is, except for the alternatives. So I
think collective judgement by the WG chairs and the IAB is the only way.
I think trustworthy and honest WG chairs and IAB members are critically
important, and a fair complaint resolution process is also important.
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