--On Thursday, September 13, 2012 00:19 -0700 Joe Touch
<touch(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu> wrote:
On 9/13/2012 12:02 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
On 9/12/2012 11:30 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
But nothing in the above, nor in the text you cite, requires
that _keep_ imply "guarantee to have available for retrieval
over the network by any interested party, with no requirement
for a special request".
It's interesting how this line of analysis entirely ignores
pragmatics.
It has been noted by a number of folk that public access has
repeatedly been demonstrated to be... useful.
That's why they were made accessible.
d/
PirateBay believes this too, and helps make movies available
for public access, honoring pragmatics.
Good luck with that line of reasoning.
Let me try that a different way. Suppose someone were to
propose that ISOC increase the subsidy to IETF sufficiently to
drop all registration fees. That would certainly be "useful".
It would be useful to those who have to pay those fees out of
their own pockets, increasing the costs of attendance and making
it harder to attend. It would be useful to those who have to
justify travel budgets and expenses. One might even suggest
that it would be useful to everyone who wasn't interested in
using the rising costs of IETF meetings to keep people out.
It would perhaps be even more useful to offer a distance-based
cash subsidy to anyone who has to travel more than, say, 3000
miles to an IETF meeting. That would not only be useful to
individuals, but would be useful in balancing out the
differential cost effects of meeting location choices and hence
in improving geographical balance in meetings.
Are there pragmatic reasons to not do either of these useful
things? Sure there are. But they would definitely be
pragmatically useful.
The questions about the public archive aren't "do people find
this useful?" but "does the utility of having the archive public
outweigh the costs and risks?" And, if the answer to the
second question is even only "maybe", "can we analyze the real
needs and determine other ways to meet them, such as by keeping
expired drafts available for a relatively short time after
expiration rather than forever, with authors having an opt-out
option?".
best,
john