Summary: bettering open source involvement

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hello,

For information about the facilitators experiment, please see
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg97290.html  This 
message contains a rough summary of the thread at 
https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99087.html

According to Mr Taht, a frequent topic of conversation during the 
last meeting was about how to get more open source involvement in 
standards orgs.  He mentioned several non-IETF conferences in the 
hope that some IETF participants would be interested in them.  There 
was a comment from Ms Woolf about DNS and open source.  Ms Shore 
commented that the IETF does not do APIs [1].  Mr Carpenter's 
response was that protocols without APIs are pretty much useless 
these days.  Mr Hammer commented about the speed at which IETF 
working groups move and the speed at which many open source projects 
move.  Mr Alvarez asked whether the discussion was about open source 
implementations of IETF standards or open source people gathered at 
IETF conferences.  Mr Livingood responded using what his team did at 
Bits & Bites as an example [2].  Ms Atlas commented that coming to an 
understanding of the perspectives of all those interested in the work 
can take time and discussion [3].  Mr
Zeeb commented about a RFC used by Mr Carpenter as an example and 
mentioned that it is a sad story [4].  He also started a different 
discussion about an open source model for publishing and obsoleting RFCs.

Mr Taht considers that standardizing something takes a lot of 
resources, a lot of different kinds of people, a lot of time, and a 
lot of things that should happen in parallel that end up happening in 
sequence and shared his thought about the concept of a "funded 
working group" [5].  There were a few comments about how long it 
takes to get a document published as a RFC in response to a comment 
from Mr Hammer about politics and religious wars stretching the 
time-to-publish to several years.  Mr Hammer also commented that, to 
some extent, IETF is driven by people who are paid by their 
organizations to be full time IETFers [6].  Ms Atlas does not think 
that there are that many people who are full time IETFers.  Mr Eggert 
mentioned an issue with code which comes with a license such as 
GPL.  Mr Carpenter commented about an IETF-friendly license if an 
IETF WG sponsors code development.  Mr Ewell commented that a spec 
must be expressed in prose, tables, formulas, pseudocode, flowcharts, 
ABNF, what have you, not in actual code in an actual programming 
language.  Mr Taht commented about the advantages to the GPL (and 
LGPL) over "standardization".  Mr Farrell agreed with Mr Eggert about 
GPL clearly having issues for some IETF participants, and argued that 
GPL is far from useless.  Mr Bernardini commented that  GPL'ed code 
could, as a second implementation, provide a useful check for interoperability.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99093.html
2. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99134.html
3. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99099.html
4. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99101.html
5. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99106.html
6. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99109.html