Re: archives (was The other parts of the report....

Bob sez:
> On the other hand, the expiration does (should) limit
> the ability to reference I-Ds as if they really existed. 

my experience is far more "should" than "does"

as an editor I'm getting more and more manuscripts that refer to
IDs by file name (I ask that the references be changed but ...) and
I'm seeing more and more such references in publications all the time

> in real academic publishing, as well
> as in IETF documents 10 years later, then the referenced documents MUST
> be archival. 

that would be nice but the growing number of URLs in such documents
seems to be a sad fact of life (inlcuding in court decisions!)

> Are you, or are you not, suggesting
> that I-Ds should become archival in this very important sense?

this is a hard question (I know, that is why you asked it)
clearly, making an archive of old IDs available on the IETF web site
would encourage people to see them as archive but I'm not sure
how much more encouragement that is over today's reality - there are
also much technology that is only available in expired IDs (and many
lessons on what not to do could be learned by seeing what did not 
make it through to the final RFC)

The reasons I'd like to see an offical archive are:
 1/ to make IPR prior art searches a little bit easier (at least the
    archive would be in an easy to find place)

 2/ make it easier for the IETF to respond to discovery requests 
    we could get some of the way there by just having the 
    archive maintained "in the normal course of business" but not
    made public but if the material is actually public then 
    we do not have to do anthing more than saying "look on
    our offical site" for that info and we do not need to
    produce the bits directly to the lawyers (responding to
    the discovery demands in the cases where I was involved 
    took quite a bit of work at Foretec - they did it and did 
    it well but it took them away from doing other things - and
    I do not expect that the IETF will stop getting requests
    in the future.

 3/ these documents are part of the intellectual history of the IETF
    and its sad that we are hiding that

the question of creating an assumption of archiveless is a byproduct
of the above is a real question and I do not know the answer

Scott


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