RE: Regarding "Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service"

[Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>]

Hi Keith,

I hope we can find a way to maintain our creativity and efficiency without using FTP.

Our goal is to produce high-quality specifications of protocols that get widely deployed in a secure way. I believe there are is still room for improvement on all fronts but I am less convinced that the protocols used for fetching the documents we read play a crucial part in that story.

Ciao
Hannes

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Moore <[e-mail]>
Sent: Thursday, November 26, 2020 1:40 PM
To: Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Regarding "Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service"

On 11/26/20 2:52 AM, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:

> I believe the real question is how do we manage change in this
> organization? In this specific case, how long are we going to support
> workflows of a smaller and smaller number of people? (I assume that
> your workstyle is less common than mine. Maybe a bold assumption.)

Yes it comes down to that.  But optimizing for the "common" workflow actually pessimizes against people who have more effective workflows, makes the organization less able to attract creative and experienced people to work for it, and makes the organization less adaptable overall.  I assert that this is exactly the wrong direction for IETF. IETF should not treat becoming more restrictive and less flexible at supporting people's workflows as a virtue.  It's bad enough when some company hampers its employees' productivity in that way, even worse when a volunteer organization does that.

IETF, of all organizations, should be trying to encourage its participants to try out new and varying ideas, not to coerce everyone into doing things the same way as everyone else.  IETF is not a factory that turns out huge numbers of identical goods.

Now granted there are always costs associated with maintaining multiple services, and at some point the usage of some service might not justify the cost.  But zero data has been presented to support this argument. Roman's data doesn't say anything about it because it's almost entirely about traffic volume, and I've seen zero assessment of the actual cost - just handwaving.

Really this is a textbook case for why "IT" shouldn't be allowed to make such decisions anywhere, but especially not in an organization that values creativity.

Keith


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