Joe,
What you say might have been true up until say the mid 1980s, but
today, it's hard to defend that statement. For many years the vast
majority of RFCs have been produced by IETF either from working groups
or individual submissions. Several other RFCs that have been
published - e.g. documents authored by other standards organizations
and by vendors - have resulted from the association of the RFC series
with IETF and with IETF-produced documents.
Yes, we've always maintained that RFC editor and IETF are independent
functions, and there are reasons for still maintaining that
separation. But it's not as if the RFC series would have significant
currency today if the IETF documents somehow disappeared from that
series.
To me it makes more sense to think of IETF and the RFC Editor having a
symbiotic relationship that allows them to collaborate in furtherance
of their mutual goals, than to think of them as entirely independent
or (worse) competing with each other for public favor.
Keith
The term RFC is one the IETF is getting a free ride on.
RFCs core to the Internet itself were independent, pre-IETF submissions.
It is THEY that establish the utility of the series, not the IETF.
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