Subject: [weirds] Fwd: Re: lessons learned

From: Eric Brunner-Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 10:39:36 -0400

this appears to have gotten stuck somewhere.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [weirds] lessons learned
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:27:27 -0400
From: Eric Brunner-Williams <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked]
Organization: wampumpeag
To: [email-masked]

On 6/13/12 11:58 AM, John Levine wrote:
> I'm sorry, but this totally misunderstands what standards are and what
> they can do.

this overlooks what the process itself does, which, inter alia, is to
remove the anti-trust liability of the contributors' employers for
what is frequently a "raising of the bar". not likely to interest
those with a single use case, whether "licit" data miners or "illicit"
data miners, operating externally to any particular contractual
regime, but something of interest to those who ... contrive with
competitors.

  All an IETF standard can do is tell people how to
> interoperate if they are already inclined to do so. 

this is all a specification can provide any implementer or service
provider attempting to produce, or consume -- a specified semantic and
associated syntax.

> Much though I would like to say the servers MUST answer all queries
> without ...

the problem is simplified if one assumes facts no longer (for quite
some time) in evidence, e.g., the non-existence of bad actors.

> There are other places to have policy arguments.  This isn't one.

the "policy" argued reduces to someone has the only use case that
matters, according to that someone. not the first time that claim has
been made. tedious. boring. wrong. etc.

-e