The IETF wgs work well when there is a clear "best" solution or set
of more or less equivalent best solutions. As far as I can tell, the
wg process and the IETF process in general have a hard time working
well when there is no clear best solution so several interests must
be traded off against each other. If a wg succeeds in doing this,
there's always someone to cry faul because their favorite interest
didn't get top billing as soon as the result leaves the wg.
agreed - but to me this is just an indicator that the current process by which
we run WGs is severely broken.
Unfortunately, we don't seem to have a way to resolve this other than
let the market decide, which isn't too good for the IETF because it
means that some work done in the IETF is subsequently deemed a
failure and people who don't understand this take a dim view of the
IETF because they think it can't create good protocols. In reality,
the IETF is successful because it allowed the market to do its work
rather than to impose the choice of a small group.
strongly disagree with this. the market is good at local optimization but is
lousy at long-term foresight. it's even worse at technical foresight. and this
has a lot to do with why the Internet is such a mess now. IETF is the biggest
repository of protocol design expertise, and the fact that IETF produces so
many protocols which are poorly designed is not by any means an indicator of
success.
Keith
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf