Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 11/20/20 11:38 AM, Chris Inacio wrote:

> FTP was great in its day.  I also really liked gopher.  Maybe more than the current web.  But let’s be real - that’s just not practical at this point, IMHO.  The Internet (at large) has moved on, possible even enabled by IETF, we should keep to that reality.

I don't want to single you out specifically, Chris, but I really think 
this is a mischaracterization that lots of people are buying into.

It's not the case that some people choose FTP over HTTP and others 
choose HTTP over FTP.   Rather, some people find tools that use FTP more 
useful than web browsers, /for some purposes/. Even the people who use 
FTP sometimes probably use web browsers for most RFC access.  But for 
some purposes, FTP is a better choice, because it supports functionality 
that web browsers don't support and can't be supported with vanilla HTTP.

So "the Internet" has /not/ moved on, but rather, some people use better 
tools than others.

The argument to deprecate FTP is essentially an argument that people who 
/prefer to use better tools shouldn't be able to do so/.  It's an 
argument to cripple those tools and impair those people's ability to work.

Of course there is some cost to maintaining an FTP server, but it should 
not be a huge cost.  There's certainly not been any support for an 
argument that "that's just not practical".  Has there even been an 
estimate of the monetary cost of maintaining FTP?

And "let's be real" sounds like an argument for a certain kind of 
prejudice - it could be rephrased as "let's force everybody to conform 
to some completely arbitrary fashion".

I don't expect IETF to support forever every possible tool that everyone 
might want to use.   But there's been no sound argument given so far 
that it should cripple FTP-based tools.

Keith