Re: x402

[Chaals Nevile <[e-mail]>]

On Monday, 31 August 2026 16:58:46 (+02:00), Brian Campbell wrote:


I'm pretty sympathetic to the sentiment here but don't expect that asking to desist will have any effect at all, whether done nicely or even via a sternly written letter. 


I agree that asking them to desist is unlikely to be worth the effort. The calculus changes if you're explicitly proposing that IETF support legal action if they fail to do so, but I suspect my conclusion doesn't. 


I think the point of open source is that others can build things and see what happens. That seems to be the sentiment expressed in e.g. RFC8721 albeit with qualifications.


It might be worthwhile suggesting that they can benefit from the experience of the people at IETF, if you're interested in putting a hand on the tiller - or clarifying how they can avoid spoiling the space for others if you have a use case that their approach would preclude. (A risk is, as always, that precluding others from building interoperable systems is a goal).


Of course tarring a whole group with the brush of "rogues and charlatans", and all of their work as garbage, possibly doesn't set up an especially good initial vibe. (There is no need to apologise for opinions, but making standards in collaboration with other people sometimes requires not just technical capability but also a little bit of withholding things you might like to say... </captainObvious>). It shouldn't be a fatal problem for a genuine effort at collaboration, but who knows.



Public ridicule and slanging matches are always available as an alternative approach. See above regarding the cost and value of effort.


cheers


chaals


There are even a x401 "standard" that seems to be capitalizing in the name recognition. 


On Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 3:46 AM Martin Thomson <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]> > wrote:

Hi everyone,

It looks like some well-intentioned people at the Linux Foundation have decided to define the semantics of the 402 status code.

I have opinions about the quality of their work (let's be frank, this is not good work; it reads like AI slop), but the more substantive point here is that the IETF is the right place to define the semantics of status codes.  Should we ask them nicely to desist?

There are some pieces that an external project should be free to define. They define some header fields for use in indicating how to make payments.  Those might be cryptocurrency garbage (I'm not going to apologize for my contempt of that technology) but those don't need to be our business.

Cheers,
Martin



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