Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com>:
> > 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.

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