Hi Folks, I happened to be at the Jabber BOF, which since has turned out to be a hot topic, at least judging from the discussions at the IESG plenary. As far as I understood, the objectives of the Jabber community were, that they mainly wanted a place for the protocol documentation to be published, and needed some expert review and help in sorting out the security services for the protocol. I didn't see an overwhealming desire to release the control for the development of the protocol to the IETF, but I may have misinterpreted things.
My perhaps a rather simplistic suggestion at the BOF was that the Jabber community submit their protocol specifications to the IESG to be published as Informational RFCs. After an addmittedly quick skim through the I-Ds, in my opinion they seemed to describe a pretty mature protocol which arguably works. And my understanding of the IETF process has also been that the IESG does commit to a fairly thorough review for even documents intended as Informational, i.e., give expert review, possibly referring to relevant WGs in the process. The answer to this suggestion at the BOF was, that the Informational would get blocked because of an existing IETF WG working on the same area of Instant Messaging and Presence. I was surprised to see that this same issue didn't seem to block a Standards Track approach. Why is that? After all, the Informational RFC should work equally well for the Jabber community, and would even allow them to retain control for the development of the protocol. I understand the Internet Relay Chat is in fact Informational, but that doesn't seem to have hampered its adoption in the Internet. My point finally is, that perhaps the IETF should embrace these entrant application layer protocols as Informational RFCs, rather than applying the "we will assimilate you" paradigm to them. ;) Cheers, Aki
