First up, Yes I see no problem with Meng continuing as the SPF
representitive. I would be slightly happier if he spoke to a handful
of members of this list and gave some indication that what he's up to
is honourable.
"No smoke without fire" - Well not often anyway, but steam can look
damned close, and that needs no fire.
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:08:17 +0200, Koen Martens <spf(_at_)metro(_dot_)cx>
wrote:
On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 05:22:08AM +0100, Shane Rush wrote:
What on earth makes anybody imagine that a new leader will do better
than Meng's spectacular failure to solicit donations or be provided
with options to delegate some tasks ?
This is an insult. Apparently, the amount of time I and others are
spending on spf as volunteers is not noted at all. Well, if that's the
case why should we bother anymore? Meng no longer cares, all those
people who rarely posted to the spf list and haven't ever written a
single piece of code or documentation don't care. Then why should I
care. Let microsoft take it over, mess it up, and we're back at square
one.
You say "Meng no longer cares", he says he does. All I've really
noticed on this list recently is political bitching. I've played the
game of students union politics, and to be honest the mess I've seen
on this list of late has been very familiar. Lots of fish who believe
that they are so big, when in the end they're tiny little things.
I have written code for SPF, mainly because Shevek asked me, I spent a
while with my head burried in Exim's source code.
You seem to forget that we are possibly a step or three ahead of
Microsoft at the minute, we have the beginings of deployment. As I
understand it far more people publish SPF records than SenderID
records, and if there are OSS implementations of SenderID given the
current MS stance on "Intellectual Property" (NB I am not against
intellectual property, just the wholesale theft of it that a number of
large corporations have managed, thanks to a broken US patent system).
SPF on the other hand definately does have implementations for many
of the large MTAs.
As I see it we only have a couple of problems:
1) Mail forwarding - SRS does solve this one, but we need massive
deployment before things like "-all" become safe
2) Getting more deployment of SPF records - Meng does seem to be
addressing this one, the support of MS for SPFv1 records (even if they
think they can abuse them in the future) would go a long way to help
such things, there are a large number of lemming like MS
administrators who would start posting records if MS said yes.
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.
I think now is the time to really fork: let Meng and his group of loyal
lurkers go on and continue microsoft, and let the ones who are putting
real coding and documentation time in spf go on with spf. I call for a
fork.
You really think that a fork will help? Are you nuts?
The community may be divided internally, most of the world won't see
this. Divide properly, and it becomes blatent. Why are people going
to deploy something where the community pushing it isn't even united.
Meng is the original author of SPF, the press see this, whatever a
group of geeks may decide, the press will still see Meng as the voice
worth listening to. There is little or no point in this community
apointing a new representitive for exactly this reason. If we were
larger, a LOT larger, then maybe.
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.
Mark