> When you have a big standards organization like the IETF, groups that work
> on bad ideas are very much desirable. They soak up the attention of
> go-ers, salescritters, loons, and career managers.
they also soak up time of other well-meaning IETF participants, not the least
IESGers who have to review their documents and try to do damage control.
some of us have joked about forming a Golgafrinchian Ark B working group, and
some of us have seriously considered doing it. but in my experience the
groups that are out of control really do waste a lot of resources that could
be better spent elsewhere, and they really do harm IETF's reputation by
producing stuff which is useless at best and harmful at worst.
> Talk such as this is not cheap. It harms by wasting time and distracting
> from the issues that matter.
in case you haven't noticed, this conversation isn't just about OPES.
> Instead of wasting time talking a battle that
> is already lost, how about fixing cs.utk.edu to answer EHLO with STARTTLS?
it's a fallacy that you can reduce system complexity by adding more complexity.
Ketih