[mpowr] Re: Quality Control and that nasty A word

["Lucy E. Lynch" <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, James Kempf wrote:

> Sorry, I disagree. No sane person is going to take the responsibility to do
> something without the authority to get it done. One argument some have made
> against giving the WG chairs more X stuff is that we don't get very good
> people as WG chairs. If they aren't given the X stuff to match their
> responsibility, we'll get even worse.
>
>                             jak

Excuse the cross post - but I thought Vixie's take on Authority
might be interesting to folks - seems pretty sane to me.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 16 Dec 2003 07:14:57 +0000
From: Paul Vixie <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Root Authority


> An interesting question I've dealt with a few times:
>
> From whom do the root nameservers derive their authority?

we (i'm speaking for f-root here) have no "authority".  nobody has to
listen to us, we are the most powerless bunch of folks you'll ever meet.

now if you'd asked where we derive our *relevance*, i'd say the same as
mr. bush and mr. kletnieks -- from all the root.cache files that point
at us.  and as long as we don't do anything stupid i guess (and hope)
that this state of affairs will continue.  (relevance trumps authority.)

that having been said, f-root got its start as NS.ISC.ORG and the man
who said it was ok for us to be a root name server was jon postel.  i'm
not sure he had any "authority" either, but folks "pointed at" him and
so what he said was relevant in spite of any authority he mightn've had.
--
Paul Vixie

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