Re: email standards

[George Michaelson <[e-mail]>]

where is CMS multipart in all this?

On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 7:56 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]
> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 4:27 PM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > On 9/23/2014 1:08 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> >> I meant two secure email standards. Empirically we have two right now,
> >> S/MIME and PGP.
> >>
> >> Since I was talking about security, I thought it was obvious from the
> context.
> >
> >
> > It wasn't.
> >
> > And to be thorough, you also forgot PEM...
>
> No, I didn't because PEM (and MOSS) came first. The original point was
> that we might have done better with a facilitator in the room with
> both groups rather than both camps removing themselves to different
> rooms and throwing rocks at each other in the hallways.
>
> PEM did do one important thing and that is it acknowledged it had failed.
>
>
> > Anyhow, sometimes we need to let competitive efforts develop and then
> > let the market choose among them.  Artificially stifling serious
> > constituenies from pursuing credible alternatives is often poor
> > engineering and worse politics.
>
> Again the point was that we might have tried other means to resolve
> the fracture rather than give up without trying.
>
>
>
> > In this case, there really was significant effort to get some amount of
> > collaboration between the two groups -- the related MIME multipart
> > constructs were designed to allow some co-habitation -- but it didn't
> > get any traction.  (One of the groups was particularly political in how
> > it managed its activities, but neither group was all that flexible.)
> >
> >
> > FWIW, it's unlikely that the competition in this case has had anything
> > to do with the poor uptake of either mechanism.
>
> The two groups think they are Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, that
> neither can live while the other survives.
>
> In practice the continued standards deadlock is allowing both camps to
> put off accepting the fact that they have not succeeded. They are both
> clinging to existence in the mistaken belief that they will take off
> as soon as the other is out of the picture.
>
> PGP has a monopoly on mindshare, S/MIME has a monopoly on deployment.
>
>
> Its like Betamax vs VHS. If we are going to get endymail deployed we
> have to get them to move to BluRay.
>
>