todd glassey wrote:
Elliot -
Then you leave it up to the party providing the service and open the IETF to
all kinds of trouble... By the way Elliot do you think your sponsor, Cisco
and their Legal department would let Cisco negotiate a contract like that?
This may be where some of the confusion is arising. RFPs are not contracts.
For the most part, in an RFP you want to specify WHAT you want to
accomplish, not the details of HOW it should be done. While on the one hand
it may be reasonable to specify a certain minimal level of support (I think
that http and ftp fall into this category, for example), rather than
specifying an implementation detail like "must supply rsync" it might be
better to spec "some form of efficient distribution and/or mirroring
software." I for one have always thought that it would be nice to be able to
use cvsup to maintain a local mirror, which is oodles more efficient than
rsync. Meanwhile, there is a lot of good work going on with other VCS
platforms that might be even better. (And don't even get me started on how
useful it would be for at least some of the work of editing documents, at
all levels, to be in a good VCS.)
The hope (although sometimes pollyannish, hope none the less) is always that
by making your desired end result sufficiently clear, without specifying
implementation in nauseating detail, that you might be able to find a
contractor who has more creative ideas for solving these problems than you
do. I'd like to see the RFP language be open enough to allow for that.
hth,
Doug
--
If you're never wrong, you're not trying hard enough
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