An open letter to the SPF community, motivated by the following two postings
to this list:
From: Meng Weng Wong
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 6:13 PM
<...>
The folks who asked me, back in January, to work with
Microsoft to produce a single standard, would have to ask me
to stop.
Instead they have been emailing me directly saying "please
keep going". They won't say it here, because we seem to
have turned this mailing list into a cross between a
kangaroo court and a witchhunt, but it's what I'm hearing.
I think it is important to keep the domain owners in mind
--- those millions of folks who will have to actually do the
dirty work of publishing the records. Keeping things as
simple as possible for them is, in my view, what will make
all this a success --- not fighting over details that they
will ultimately find irrelevant.
From: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 8:55 PM
<...>
In the real world a lot of decisions take place in what are now
fortunately smoke free rooms but the principle is the same.
In December last year there was a meeting at the Aspen institute
where a number of Industry leaders and academics came together
to work on the spam and net crime problems. Neither Meng nor
Microsoft were present.
Out of that meeting came an invitation only meeting at Harvard
attended by all the major ISPs, the major email senders, the
vendors, the proposers of the email authentication schemes.
Each person present had been choosen specifically because they
The overwhelming consensus in that room was that it would be
better if there was one solution rather than SPF and SenderID
The same sort of consensus has been present at every single
email/spam conference Meng and I have attended over the past
year - of which there have been many.
I am grateful to Phillip and Meng for being honest as to where the decisions
that have seemed so incongruous to the bulk of the SPF group have come from.
It points to a fundamental disconnect between the people who have been
laboring here for free on different aspects of SPF and those who attended
those invitation-only meeting. Having worked in Engineering Management
roles at large companies, I, too, have been in many meetings like the one
Phillip described. While Phillip's statement that this is how a lot of
things happen "in the real world" is certainly true, I can assure all of you
that the open standards/open source world that we are working in is every
bit as real as the one Phillip refers to. In our real world, however,
decisions are made differently.
This is an open standards group that works on consensus and builds open
source software. Whatever goes on in private discussions does not and
cannot represent the SPF group. While their wishes and desires are
certainly of great interest to us, this is not their process, it is ours.
If Phillip and Meng are acting on the wishes of a small private group
against the positions clearly expressed by the majority on this list, both
of them should immediately stop claiming to represent SPF in any way, shape
or form and publicly dissociate themselves from the effort. They can
certainly represent that private group at its pleasure, but not the people
on this list.
If that private group is indeed where Meng is taking his counsel, he is not
representing our public SPF effort and has not been for some time. That
cannot continue any longer and something has to change.
I have nothing but admiration for all the hard work that you, Meng, have
done to create the SPF community and you should be very proud of what has
been accomplished. The fact that you took the advice of a small group of
key industry figures and gambled on a merger with Microsoft was a calculated
risk that unfortunately did not work out. We all knew it was risky and even
though the majority did not agree, we trusted you to make that decision and
take the risk on our behalf. At this point, that is all water under the
bridge.
Moving forward, however, it is abundantly clear that the majority here do
not want to continue working with Microsoft and your contrary position has
brought our work to a standstill. At this point, you can either continue to
represent the small private group that you referred to, or you can represent
the SPF group's wishes as expressed on this forum. You cannot do both. I
am not encouraged by your characterization of the statements on this forum
of hardworking volunteers as "a cross between a kangaroo court and a
witchhunt". If the people who are privately advising you are afraid to air
their views on this list, then they choose to disenfranchise themselves from
the result. From my viewpoint, this is one of the more civil forums that I
have taken part in and they have little to fear. Please make up your mind
and let us know your decision so we can get on with this important work.
--
Seth Goodman