On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > Eliot Lear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > We're not out to rid the world of patent-laden work, nor are we out to > > make patent owners rich. The IETF exists to promulgate relevant and > > correct standards to the Internet Community, and educate people on their > > intended safe use. > > You'll talk yourself right into the dustbin of history with that line.
Its always the people that have the The Final Ultimate Spam Solution that shrilly and stridently claim it must be "done now!" or its "into the dustbin". In fact, the only thing that has gone "into the dustbin" are some of the wacky anti-spam schemes, like open relay testing/blocking. > Reality check: Apache has 68% market share. Open-source MTAs handle 85% of > all email traffic. Yea for open source! Reality check: The IETF is not here to promote __open source__, only open standards. There is a subtle but important difference. If you can't distinguish between them, you need to learn a bit more about them. And if you can distinguish between them, perhaps you need to make an effort to work with people who don't share your views. Important participants in the IETF are not proponents of open source, and some important participants are also pro-patent. We make some compromises to work with them. They make some compromises to work with us. Eliot Lear describes those compromises: The IETF is neutral on patents (with disclosure), and produces open standards which may be implemented in closed source. > When Meng Weng Wong was thinking about how to evangelize SPF, his first > instinct was to bypass IETF and go straight to the open-source MTA > developers -- I had to lobby hard to persuade him to go through the RFC > process, and now I wonder if I was right to do that. The RFC process was the right decision because as a result of the objective critical technical analysis by many people, it was shown that SPF doesn't stop spam, and that it actually makes a number of problems worse (i.e. it causes one to get 100% of backscatter, instead of just the backscatter from non-existant addresses). And further, it was evident (at least to me anyway) that SPF/Sender-ID were also targets of exploitation by spam-profiteers. By contrast, If Meng Weng Wong had just written his own document without benefit of objective critical technical analysis, a lot of system administrators who are unable to perform the necessary critical analysis would have gone along with the recommendations and wasted their time and effort deploying something that was just going to make their problems and the problmes of others much worse. And then the spam-profiteers would have decended anyway with patents and other schemes, anyway. The effort would finally be abandoned, and technical progress delayed. As it stands, Meng Weng and others can continue researching other avenues that may lead to something productive. Or not. But the rest of the world isn't wasting its time on this particular scheme that won't work. -- Av8 Internet Prepared to pay a premium for better service? www.av8.net faster, more reliable, better service 617 344 9000 _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
