ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Change the subject! RE: [IAOC] Re: IPv4 Outage Planned for IETF71 Plenary

2007-12-31 07:39:26
On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 05:36:17AM +0000, Greg Skinner wrote:
FWIW, I reread Russ Housley's comments on the outage, and understand
it to be an experiment that is voluntary (but encouraged).  Perhaps
this needs to be stated differently (e.g. "IPv6 experiment planned for
IETF71 Plenary").

I think the real issue here is the difference between what was
originally stated (I think first by Marshall Rose in the Open Book) as
the difference between the ISO, promulgating OSI, and the IETF,
promulgating TCP/IP --- which was that ISO was populated primarily by
professional standard organization "goers", where as the IETF was
populated primarily by engineers, or "doers".

To the extent that you have developers who are actually helping to
write code and develop reference implementations for the protocol
specifications that one is helping to write, it is probably much more
likely that that population is willing to hack their laptop to run
IPv6 --- even if they have a locked-down laptop issued by the IT
department (which very few engineers I know are willing to
countenance, and will generally tend to work around one way or
another), they can probably use VMware to run a sandbox environment
which they *can* use to experiment.  Note that this has *nothing* to
do with whether the engineer uses Linux or Windows or NetBSD or MacOS
as their primary laptop OS.

On the other hand, if you have professional standards body attendees,
who are perhaps technical enough to talk about a standard, but not
enough to actually implement it, and whose primary expertise is in
politics and the policies and procedures of each particular standards
organization (so they know how to pack a working group or national
body with representatives that will vote they want) --- they will tend
to view their Windows laptop as a production environment as a sealed
box, not to be touched, and only useful for e-mail, powerpoint, and
microsoft word, it is much less likely they will be willing (or even
able) to participate in such an experiment.

Over the years, I suspect the ratio of goers vs. doers has been
increasing; but I hope there are enough doers still attending the IETF
to justify the "Engineering" in the title of the organization.

                                          - Ted

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf