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Re: [Trustees] ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your review and comments on a proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem

2009-01-09 12:38:01


Fred Baker wrote:
From my perspective, the best approach involves keeping the general case simple. The documents that have been transferred outside the IETF in the past five years is a single digit number, a tenth of a percent of all RFCs if not a smaller fraction. From my perspective, the simplest solution to the transfer issue is to ask the people relevant to a document for which transfer has been suggested whether they have an issue with transferring it, rather than asking every document author his or her opinion on the vast majority of documents, which will never be transferred.


+1 for simplicity, pragmatics, stability, narrowness of impact, and probably "legality".

A number of the comments, so far, appear to hinge on a rather basic cost/benefit model that is clearly quite different from what the proposal is based. I suspect that difference comes from a different sense of the problem, per John Klensin's posting.

My reference to "legality" is based on a view of the proposal which sees it as having individual submitters essentially say "I am required to get permission and I have not gotten it". That's an admission of guilt, which seems like a very bad thing to admit and formally document, particularly for an issue involving the law. And if you don't think that's what the proposal calls for, please explain, because I don't think my interpretation is all that creative.


I am also struck by the proposal's noting:

This situation has halted the progression of some Internet-Drafts and interrupted the publication of some RFCs.

This means that we have a crisis which is stopping productive work, yet the crisis appears to be caused by a faulty new requirement, rather than by the situation that the document seeks to correct. In other words, remove the new requirement and we no longer have a crisis. We have an issue to pursue -- the same one that prompted the new requirement -- but no crisis.

d/
--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net
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