On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 10:01:37AM +0100, NSLM wrote:
|
| I have stayed quiet until now because when it comes down to any of the
| major issues, that aren't political infighting, I just plain don't
| know, I'm in a world amongst giants. But don't forget that some of us
| quiet little midgets have been getting on with the job of coding.
Writing SPF Classic code and getting it into MTAs is the
single most important task we have right now. We have to
keep doing this or Microsoft wins. The playing field is
what it is: there will be an SPF Classic experimental RFC
and we now need to write implementations and test that they
interoperate.
So I applaud the folks who have their heads down and are
focusing on the code, not on the politics.
| Let's get back to what actually matters, and get ourselves an
| experimental RFC we can point to. If there are things wrong with the
| RFC they will show themselves, that's the entire point of experimental
| status, you make the mistakes, they show themselves, you correct them,
| you then push for full RFC status.
Despite working with MS, my objectives remain exactly the
same as everybody else's: to get SPF Classic working so we
can solve forgery soon and spam eventually. I worked with
Microsoft for two reasons: (1) the industry asked me to,
and (2) MS was trying to kill SPF entirely, and that kind of
war wasn't good for the industry. Getting SPF Classic into
Sender ID now means that MS has to publicly support
mail-from checking, when six months ago they were trying to
kill it entirely. I don't know how many people are looking
at things at a strategic level, but this is a huge win.
If the industry had known about the technical weaknesses of
PRA, and that it was only really suited for MUA
implementations, and if the industry had known about the
patent problems, would it have asked me to merge SPF with
Caller ID? Who knows.
In any case, it's time to put all that behind us and get
back to coding. I'm sure we can all agree on that.
The folks who don't want to run the race at all now that
another player is in the game are like those countries that
withdraw from the Olympics out of spite. And refusing to
play is the one sure way to deny yourself the prize. So if
you feel that your work has been hijacked and you don't want
to do MS's work for free, then maybe you're more interested
in getting credit for your achievements than in actually
accomplishing the objectives. I personally would be happy
to refer any further media contacts to you so I can get back
to coding.