Dear Mr. Brown:
I am writing to you (and CC'ing the boards members of the FSF, less one whose
emailbox I couldn't easily locate) in an attempt to explain to you (and
convince you) that 'mass mailings' to the IETF mailing list (or any IETF
list) of the sort the FSF has now attempted twice (once back in October,
2007; and again this week) don't work, and are in fact, if anything,
_counter-productive_ to the FSF's own goals!
The IETF 'members' (since IETF membership is rather a loose concept) are not
impressed with numbers, but rather with cogent and well-reasoned arguments -
and an argument becomes neither more cogent, nor more well-reasoned, by
virtue of being repeated 100 times.
The analogy is not perfect, but you need to approach the IETF more like a
court: a judge - at least, a good one - is not supposed to be influenced by
the number of protestors on the steps of their court; rather, they are
supposed to be influenced by the cogency of the arguments laid before them.
Refiling the exact same amicus brief 100 times (or slightly reworded) isn't
going to have any effect - except to irritate the judge, that they have to
plow through them all.
Efforts such as the one you have laid out in your recent appeal:
http://www.fsf.org/news/reoppose-tls-authz-standard
have exactly the same effect. Many thousands of people, many of whom are as
busy as your board members, have had their inboxes inundated with a hundred
(and more will arrive shortly, no doubt) basically identical messages (either
cut-and-paste, or at best, rephrasings, of that initial press release). The
natural human reaction is to be irritated - especially since we tried to
point out _last time_ you all tried this how ineffective this was.
I can pretty much guarantee you that it has _no_ positive influence (as the
FSF would view it) effect on the IETF deliberations, and in fact, probably
does active harm to the FSF's _own_ goals.
That is because the IETF has good reason to react negatively to 'drive-by'
email campaigns. How is what the FSF tried substantially different from
BigCorp X telling everyone who works for it 'we want standard X approved,
please send in email to the IETF list asking for it to be approved'. You
wouldn't think that was good, would you? No, I didn't think so. So if the
IETF allows themselves to be influenced by one mass email campaign, all we
are doing is virtually guaranteeing that we will get more. So we have an
active interest is responding _negatively_ to such campaigns.
You also need to understand that the vast majority of the IETF are as unhappy
about producing encumbered technology as you are; and in general, all else
being equal, will much prefer an unencumbered solution. In some cases, after
(usually) carefully considering the pros and cons in some detail, we will
produce such a technology; but you can take it as read that we have, after
due consideration, decided that there are advantages that outweigh that
significant disadvantage. The classic example was our use of public-private
key-systems while the RSA patent was still active; the factors were complex,
but included the power of the idea, the fact that the patent had not long to
run, etc, etc.
If the FSF wants to have the maximal effect, you should prepare the best case
you can make against a particular submission (and simply saying 'encumbered
technology is bad' is _not_ a good case; most of us agree with that, and if
we have decided to go against that, in a particular instance, we must have
had good reasons, and it is _those_ reasons you need to address). Then, send
_one_ copy in to the list, where I can virtually guarantee you that it will
be read more carefully than an avalance of 'me too' messages.
Noel
PS: Fellow IETF'ers (CC'd), please, no 'me too' messages to the FSF board
members; if you have a good point I didn't make, please send it along, but
otherwise, let's extend to their emailboxes the same courtesy we are
requesting that they extend to ours.
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