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Summary: bettering open source involvement

2016-08-02 04:46:19
Hello,

For information about the facilitators experiment, please see
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg97290.html This message contains a rough summary of the thread at https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99087.html

According to Mr Taht, a frequent topic of conversation during the last meeting was about how to get more open source involvement in standards orgs. He mentioned several non-IETF conferences in the hope that some IETF participants would be interested in them. There was a comment from Ms Woolf about DNS and open source. Ms Shore commented that the IETF does not do APIs [1]. Mr Carpenter's response was that protocols without APIs are pretty much useless these days. Mr Hammer commented about the speed at which IETF working groups move and the speed at which many open source projects move. Mr Alvarez asked whether the discussion was about open source implementations of IETF standards or open source people gathered at IETF conferences. Mr Livingood responded using what his team did at Bits & Bites as an example [2]. Ms Atlas commented that coming to an understanding of the perspectives of all those interested in the work can take time and discussion [3]. Mr Zeeb commented about a RFC used by Mr Carpenter as an example and mentioned that it is a sad story [4]. He also started a different discussion about an open source model for publishing and obsoleting RFCs.

Mr Taht considers that standardizing something takes a lot of resources, a lot of different kinds of people, a lot of time, and a lot of things that should happen in parallel that end up happening in sequence and shared his thought about the concept of a "funded working group" [5]. There were a few comments about how long it takes to get a document published as a RFC in response to a comment from Mr Hammer about politics and religious wars stretching the time-to-publish to several years. Mr Hammer also commented that, to some extent, IETF is driven by people who are paid by their organizations to be full time IETFers [6]. Ms Atlas does not think that there are that many people who are full time IETFers. Mr Eggert mentioned an issue with code which comes with a license such as GPL. Mr Carpenter commented about an IETF-friendly license if an IETF WG sponsors code development. Mr Ewell commented that a spec must be expressed in prose, tables, formulas, pseudocode, flowcharts, ABNF, what have you, not in actual code in an actual programming language. Mr Taht commented about the advantages to the GPL (and LGPL) over "standardization". Mr Farrell agreed with Mr Eggert about GPL clearly having issues for some IETF participants, and argued that GPL is far from useless. Mr Bernardini commented that GPL'ed code could, as a second implementation, provide a useful check for interoperability.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99093.html
2. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99134.html
3. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99099.html
4. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99101.html
5. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99106.html
6. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99109.html