A sad farewell
Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@levkowetz.com> Tue, 03 November 2020 14:42 UTC
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From: Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@levkowetz.com>
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Date: Tue, 03 Nov 2020 15:42:12 +0100
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Subject: A sad farewell
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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
- Re: A sad farewell Russ Housley
- A sad farewell Henrik Levkowetz
- Re: A sad farewell Ladislav Lhotka
- Re: A sad farewell Alissa Cooper
- RE: A sad farewell Ron Bonica
- Re: A sad farewell Barry Leiba
- Re: A sad farewell Suresh Krishnan
- Re: A sad farewell Eric Vyncke (evyncke)
- Re: A sad farewell Toerless Eckert
- Re: A sad farewell Mirja Kuehlewind
- Re: A sad farewell Keith Moore
- Re: A sad farewell JORDI PALET MARTINEZ
- Re: A sad farewell Stephen Farrell
- Re: A sad farewell Daniel Migault
- Re: A sad farewell S Moonesamy
- Re: A sad farewell Charlie Perkins
- Re: A sad farewell Jay Daley
- Re: A sad farewell Loa Andersson
- Re: A sad farewell Soininen, Jonne (Nokia - FI/Espoo)
- Re: A sad farewell Dirk Kutscher
- Re: A sad farewell Stephane Bortzmeyer
- Re: A sad farewell Carsten Bormann
- Re: A sad farewell Lloyd W
- Re: A sad farewell Leif Johansson
- Re: A sad farewell Behcet Sarikaya
- Re: A sad farewell Julian Reschke
- Re: A sad farewell Ralph Droms
- Re: A sad farewell Brian E Carpenter
- Re: A sad farewell Benoit Claise
- Re: A sad farewell Behcet Sarikaya
- Re: A sad farewell Keith Moore
- Re: A sad farewell Joseph Touch
- Re: A sad farewell Jim Fenton
- Re: A sad farewell Alia Atlas
- RE: A sad farewell Valery Smyslov
- WAIT. Take a moment. Re: A sad farewell Eliot Lear
- Re: WAIT. Take a moment. Re: A sad farewell Alexander Pelov
- Re: WAIT. Take a moment. Re: A sad farewell Carsten Bormann
- Re: WAIT. Take a moment. Re: A sad farewell Henrik Levkowetz
- Re: A sad farewell Henrik Levkowetz
- Re: A sad farewell Mehmet Ersue
- RE: A sad farewell Eric Gray
- Re: A sad farewell Stewart Bryant
- Re: A sad farewell Theodore Y. Ts'o
- Re: A sad farewell Leif Johansson
- Re: A sad farewell Larry Masinter
- Re: A sad farewell Leif Johansson
- Re: A sad farewell Pete Resnick
- Re: A sad farewell Carsten Bormann
- Re: A sad farewell Joe Touch
- Re: A sad farewell Joel M. Halpern
- Re: A sad farewell Larry Masinter
- Re: A sad farewell Jay Daley
- Re: A sad farewell Joseph Touch
- Re: A sad farewell Larry Masinter
- Re: A sad farewell Brian E Carpenter
- Re: A sad farewell Jay Daley
- Re: A sad farewell Salz, Rich
- Re: A sad farewell Larry Masinter
- Re: A sad farewell Salz, Rich
- Re: A sad farewell Salz, Rich
- Re: A sad farewell Larry Masinter
- Re: A sad farewell Joseph Touch
- Re: A sad farewell Keith Moore
- Re: A sad farewell Masataka Ohta
- Re: A sad farewell Joseph Touch
- Re: A sad farewell Lloyd W
- Re: A sad farewell Leif Johansson
- discussion of tools and requirements Re: A sad fa… Amelia Andersdotter
- Re: A sad farewell Fernando Gont
- Re: A sad farewell Livingood, Jason
- Re: A sad farewell Livingood, Jason
- RE: A sad farewell Adrian Farrel
- Re: A sad farewell Livingood, Jason
- Re: A sad farewell Fernando Gont
- Re: A sad farewell Alissa Cooper
- Re: A sad farewell Salz, Rich
- Document diffs... Re: A sad farewell Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: Document diffs... Re: A sad farewell Joseph Touch
- Re: Document diffs... Re: A sad farewell Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: A sad farewell tom petch
- Re: Document diffs... Re: A sad farewell Joseph Touch
- Re: A sad farewell Russ Housley
- Why we have situated software (Re: A sad farewell) Carsten Bormann
- Re: Why we have situated software (Re: A sad fare… Pete Resnick
- Why we have situated software (Re: A sad farewell) Carsten Bormann
- Re: Document diffs... Re: A sad farewell Carsten Bormann
- Re: A sad farewell Donald Eastlake
- and... text for the win Michael Richardson
- Re: and... text for the win John Levine
- Re: and... text for the win Carsten Bormann
- Re: and... text for the win Julian Reschke
- Re: and... text for the win Christian Huitema
- Re: and... text for the win Eric Vyncke (evyncke)
- Re: and... text for the win Carsten Bormann
- Re: and... text for the win Marc Petit-Huguenin
- Re: and... text for the win Charlie Perkins
- Re: A sad farewell Masataka Ohta
- What is going wrong? Was: A sad farewell Phillip Hallam-Baker
- Re: What is going wrong? Was: A sad farewell Masataka Ohta