Re: How to pay $47 for a copy of RFC 793

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Tuesday, May 10, 2011 13:20 +0000 John Levine
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>...
> It's not just that.  A little poking around in the ACM DL
> reveals that they don't have any RFCs published after May
> 2004.  It looks like someone did a one time data dump, and
> nothing since.  It's also fairly annoying that if you aren't a
> subscriber, they want you to pay $15 before they'll give you a
> URL, but I suppose their funding has to come from somewhere.

I ran a few tests, but didn't try to figure out how current
their catalog is.  Will complain about that too.  As to the
price, yes, I think these library arrangements (whether by
subscription or per-article) are a little costly for
individuals.  On the other hand, if one has an RFC number
--which would come from the sort of reference Bob cited to start
this thread and that one would inevitably get from the ACM DL if
they included RFC numbers in the search-- the a trip to your
favorite general-purpose engine with the number does yield URLs
to freely-accessible copies.  I have only tried three of them,
but the documents aren't hard to find and the indexing seems to
be current through at least documents published last month.  So,
again, "free" may be slightly less convenient (or slightly
more), but I don't see this as a problem we need to solve on the
IETF list.

I will ping ACM again about not being up to date.

> In IEEE Xplore, I can't find any RFCs at all, no matter how I
> search for them.  Search for "Transmission Control Protocol"
> and you'll find lots of articles but no RFCs.

I found what you found, i.e., no RFCs but several articles that
referenced them.  I thought I said that in an earlier note, but
maybe I wasn't clear.

 best,
    john