Minor comments on draft-ietf-problem-statement-00.txt

[RJ Atkinson]

On Friday, Feb 28, 2003, at 13:39 America/Montreal, Spencer Dawkins 
wrote:
> My recollection from the OUTSIDE was that (other) groups weren't
> willing to incorporate IETF protocols by reference until we started
> telling people we were an SDO, too - they cycled a couple of times
> including IETF spec text, and trying to keep it synced with IETF
> versions as they moved forward ("moved around"), but this was horrid.

That is not inconsistent to my memory.

(I remain unconvinced that it was a good thing for IETF to become more
like every other SDO over the past ~10 years.)

> Wasn't the MILSPEC version of TCP an example of this kind of thing?

I don't think that is a very good example.  US DoD, until the early
1990s, wrote MILSPECs for lots of things that already had other
well-recognised standards (e.g. "nuts and bolts used in aircraft").
So TCP as a MILSPEC had nothing really to do with the question of
whether IETF was an SDO and everything to do with the (then) procurement
culture inside US DoD.  In modern days, US DoD is broadly happy citing
any openly published specification in a procurement.  (Again, take
this paragraph and apply it *broadly*, including stuff far away from
networking.)

Cheers,

Ran