Re: [rtcweb] Why voting is not a viable process for the IETF (Was: Last day for any additional Video Codec Selection alternatives )

[Silvia Pfeiffer <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 8:03 AM, Emil Ivov <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>
> On 28.11.13, 04:37, cowwoc wrote:
>>
>> I've heard objections along the lines of "IETF does not vote. We reach
>> consensus by evaluating the technical merits of each argument and choose
>> the one with the least number of objections".
>
>
> Note that these are not just a matter of ideology there are very practical
> reasons why voting can't be properly implemented here.
>
> More on that below.
>
>> My counter-argument is that this isn't a technical question
>
>
> Then there is NO reason for it to be answered by the IETF.
>
>> (we've
>> reached consensus that both VP8 and H.264 are "good enough" from a
>> technical point of view). This is a legal and political question.
>
>
> Exactly the kind of questions that the IETF does NOT handle.

Standards are created such that system are able to interoperate with
each other. Deciding to avoid the decision for an MTI and thus
creating non-interoperable rtcweb systems is giving up on
standardising interoperability. IMO that is very much a technical
question.

What if we standardised power plugs and sockets and couldn't agree on
the shape of the plug and socket, so left it for anyone to do what
they liked. I'd call that a failed standardisation. It's the same
here: if we can't agree on what encoding and decoding formats must be
supported, we can't plug a WebRTC connection together. #FAIL

Regards,
Silvia.