RE: A sad farewell

[Ron Bonica <[e-mail]>]

Henrik,

You will be severely missed.

Good luck in whatever comes next.

                                                   Ron



Juniper Business Use Only

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Russ Housley
Sent: Tuesday, November 3, 2020 10:04 AM
To: Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]>
Cc: IETF <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: A sad farewell

[External Email. Be cautious of content]


Hernik:

I am sad that you will not be participating any longer.  I will miss you.

In July 2007, I told the whole plenary about the heroic rewrite that you and Bill Fenner did for all of us:

        https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/69/slides/plenaryw-3/sld9.htm__;!!NEt6yMaO-gk!TYOs5pfCv2S85pEhP4oMLvlXqWfwQfDbxgEGl9WL1otlo6nicWDbV1Q4VV00Tpva$

I wish you well.

Russ


> On Nov 3, 2020, at 9:42 AM, Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Dear friends and acquaintances,
>
> After 20 years of writing tools for the IETF, I will let my contract 
> for tools maintenance lapse at the end of the year, and move on to other things.
> The reason is the attitude of the current IETF Chair and LLC Board 
> towards contractors in particular and IETF participants in general.  
> Care for the community doesn't seem to matter to them.
>
> The current Chair and LLC Board seems to see contractors, including 
> the secretariat and myself, not as members of the community, but 
> simply someone who should do what they are told by the authority in 
> charge.  This in total contrast with the approach of Russ Housley as 
> IETF Chair; he explicitly tried to make the secretariat and other 
> contractors an integral part of the community, inviting them in, rather than pushing them out.
>
> Remembering how supportive the previous full Exec Dir, Ray Pelletier 
> had been with respect to the tools work, I was hoping that things 
> would change at the end of last year with Jay Daley; unfortunately it 
> hasn't; rather the opposite, and it has simply become too painful to carry on.
>
> Things got bad at the end of last year, when the LLC Board went back 
> on their word after accepting my bid on the RFP in full without 
> reservations; they simply changed the contract offered without one 
> word of conversation about the changes.  My bid would have been 
> substantially different for an RFP with the conditions in that 
> contract.  That was tough, but the final straw came at the beginning 
> of 2020, when a Tools Architecture and Strategy Team was established 
> to look at the tools future, and I was excluded from it.  Being 
> considered a replaceable cog and not a part of the community is not a 
> fun environment in which to work, and I've been depressed for most of the year following that.
>
> The consequence is, as indicated above, that I  will not sign on to 
> any contract renewal or bid on any new RFP when the current term runs 
> out for the tools maintenance contract at the end of the year.
>
> Many and big thanks are due to all the IETF chairs who have supported 
> and encouraged my tools work: Harald Alvestrand, Brian Carpenter, Russ 
> Housley, and Jari Arkko.  Huge appreciation and gratitude also goes to 
> Robert Sparks and Russ Housley for the privilege of working with them 
> in the Tools Team and the TMC (Tools Management Committee).  And 
> finally, thanks to all the members of the community who over the years 
> have made it a joy to do tools work, by expressing their appreciation of the tools.
>
> ----------
>
> The longer story, for background, to explain how I came to feel so 
> strongly about being excluded from tools architecture work and having 
> the LLC Board go back on their word without even thinking it was worth 
> talking to me about
> it:
>
> I wrote my first draft of a draft in 1999; my first meeting was IETF 49.
>
> In 2001, Sami Vaarala and I both presented drafts outlining NAT 
> traversal for Mobile IP, and based on the way we worked to merge these 
> and build consensus, I became co-chair of MIP4, a position I held till 
> the group was closed in 2015 (although there was essentially no 
> activity during the last
> 5 years).
>
> I early thought it absolutely silly that in the internet age, IETF 
> documents were not available as HTML documents with internal and 
> external links.  That led to rfcmarkup (2002), which was deployed to 
> provide htmlized versions of RFCs, and later drafts, first on my own domain, and later on tools.ietf.org.
>
> As I was writing drafts, I was annoyed with having to manually check 
> the format requirements (line length, boilerplate, and whatnot), and 
> adapted an awk snipped as a 10-line script to check line length for me 
> (2003).  That grew, and became 'idnits'.
>
> Having to read new revisions of drafts, to keep up with other Mobile 
> IP contributions, I found it annoying not to know where the changes in 
> the new rev were, and how much was changed.  This led to 'rfcdiff' (2003).
>
> As WG co-chairs, we had to put together a summary of the status of the 
> various documents before each meeting -- that status report was the 
> main way to let participants know about draft progress, since there 
> was no datatracker in 2000, and no WG support in the IESG tracker tool 
> when it appeared.  Doing the summary each meeting was very much drudge 
> work, and becoming tired of repeating the exercise each meeting, I 
> created a document status page for MIP4, updated automatically from 
> various text files available from the draft repository and the IESG 
> tracker (around 2004).  Other chairs saw this, and asked me to do the 
> same for them, and it grew from there, and was eventually incorporated into the official datatracker as WG pages.
>
> Around late 2006/early 2007, serious SQL injection vulnerabilities 
> were discovered in the datatracker as it was then.  After a lot of 
> feet-dragging by the vendor in addressing the vulnerabilities, Bill 
> Fenner and I started a skunk-works project to completely rewrite the 
> publicly accessible datatracker from old-style Perl to Python and 
> Django.  For 2 months we worked up to 10 hours per day, and disclosed 
> the effort only when we had enough in place to show that the effort 
> was viable.  The powers that were applauded the effort, and we carried through, and released the rewrite in June 2007.
>
> I continued to do tools work during 40%-50% of my time up till 2016, 
> at no cost to the IETF -- all work and tools were donated by myself or 
> my employer over the years.  In 2016 I was about to switch employers, 
> and the IETF Chair and several previous chairs saw the opportunity to 
> get me to work full time on IETF tools, which I happily did until the 
> current chair started to seriously treat me not as a member of the 
> community but as a contractor that needed to be told just what to do 
> in early 2018.  After that, things went downhill.
>
> As mentioned earlier, the final straw came early this year, when 
> Alissa and Jay decided to set up a Tools Architecture and Strategy 
> Team, and excluded me from that work.  That was to me such a clear and 
> unequivocal statement of me not being considered part of the community 
> that it drove me into a depression, from which I could only partially 
> recover by distancing myself from the tools effort more and more.  The 
> depression has gone in waves in the following months, often triggered 
> by additional actions and statements showing the same attitude.
>
> I don't know which attitude the next Chair will have, but even if it's 
> more in line with earlier chairs, the LLC Board and Jay, who have been 
> part of making this year a miserable one for me, will still be there, not much changed.
>
> So it's not with joy I move on and look for other things to occupy me; 
> it's with sadness in abandoning an area in which I've invested a lot 
> of myself over the last 20 years.
>
> My best wishes to you all going forward.
>
>
>       Henrik
>
>
>
>