Re: email standards

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

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.