Re: A sad farewell

[Dirk Kutscher <[e-mail]>]

Dear Henrik,

thanks for all the hard work and excellent support in the past.

Wishing you all the best,

Dirk



On 3 Nov 2020, at 15:42, Henrik Levkowetz wrote:

> 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