On 12/05/2014 19:40, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 10:23 PM, Brian E Carpenter
<brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
Nikos,
I like to think of somebody else: a young programmer working far,
far away, who will probably never attend an IETF meeting or join
an IETF mailing list. For this person, we need to state things that
are obvious to us. For example:
"It is not sufficient to do an initial implementation of the protocol.
Maintenance is needed to apply changes as the come out in the future,
especially to fix security issues that are found after the initial
publication of a protocol specification."
This document doesn't fill this purpose as it is written as a what-to-do
document rather than a document with advice to implementers. If somebody
has specific expectations from implementers then that should be
reflected in a contract with them.
That's a straw man. You know very well that (precisely because IETF
standards are voluntary) there will never be such a contract between
the IETF and the implementer.
I believe that's to the point of the document. Unless there is a
contract between IETF and the implementer, such documents should be
published as advisory to the implementer rather than listing
expectations from the implementer. That's at minimum a matter of
courtesy to implementers.
If on the other hand this is written in purpose to introduce
IETF-certified or IETF-approved implementations it must be even more
precise than this document. As it is, it doesn't fill any obvious
purpose.
The document is aspirational, not contractual. It seems perfectly reasonable
to ask implementers (whether a profit-making company, an open-source
community, or an individual) to accept ongoing responsibility for their
code. Isn't that exactly what GnuTLS does, for example?
The only expectations from an implementation are the ones you see in
written in the contract you have with the implementer. If you don't
have one, then you check the license of the implementation. On gnutls
that you refer to, if you got without any contract, you see: 'BECAUSE
THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY
Of course. Most open source code comes with such a disclaimer,
and so do RFCs. (It's an indirect reference now, but for years all
RFCs contained text starting "This document and the information contained
herein is provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND
THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES...").
We're not talking about legalities though. We're talking about
voluntary behavior.
Brian