Subject: RE: How IETF treats contributors

From: "Thomas Gal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 17:11:40 -0700

I agree with: 

"This isn't suppose to be an ego trip. If people really think the documents
are important, they don't need their names on them.  If they need their name
on it, they are doing it for the wrong reasons."

	Not to mention the spirit of removing authorship. In reality I feel
like this amounts to removing the title or something else that is so
obviuosly a part of a document. Certainly there is no shame in being proud
of your work, and nobody can help but feel a little miffed when something
they did may have been overlooked. Seems fairly possible however that the
people who are most interested in this subject probably know what really
maters, and one way or another EVERYONE on the IETF list now knows. The
solutions to these kinds of problems have always been in your hands, and YOU
are empowered when you choose not to care....or at least let something get
under your skin.

	Isn't the point here that EVERYONE hates spam?

-Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of John
Day
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 4:06 PM
To: Hadmut Danisch; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: How IETF treats contributors

The best solution is to remove all authorship from all Internet standards,
then there will be no problems.  This isn't suppose to be an ego trip. If
people really think the documents are important, they don't need their names
on them.  If they need their name on it, they are doing it for the wrong
reasons.

You don't find authors on the output of the standards groups.  The most you
will find is a list of the membership at the time of approval.

Take care,
John

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---

From: "Olaf M. Kolkman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 10:40:16 +0200

> on it, they are doing it for the wrong reasons."

Me too. Documents should only be written if they are important for the
commons. 

But.

If it comes to acknowledging attributions we have to be careful. I do
not think it is a good idea to drop authorship of documents.  We do
not have many means to motivate people. Giving credit is actually one
of very few means that the IETF has available as a motivational
tool. 

It is easy to forget folk that where involved in early stages, but as
Christian said "bits are cheap" and if there is doubt on where to stop
acknowledging people we'd better be safe than sorry.

I'd like to expand on what Dean said: "Credit and attribution is about
intellectual honesty [ and _courtesy_ ] not about copyright law".

-- Olaf

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 08:40:44 -0600 (MDT)

> From: "Olaf M. Kolkman" 

> intellectual honesty [ and _courtesy_ ] not about copyright law".

Ok, but in the case at hand, 

  - None of the versions of Mr. Danish's proposal that I've seen
     credited Mr. Vixie's document or some others than preceded Mr.
     Danish's work.  I think that was due to ignornance and disinterest
     instead of malice, but it does reduce Mr. Danish's standing to 
     more credit than he already receives.

  - Mr. Danish's proposal was always an obvious non-starter for various
     reasons, including the requirement for defining new DNS RR types
     before it could be deployed or even tested.

  - Mr. Vixie's proposal is a lot closer to what I understand of the
     current MARID mechanisms than Mr. Danish's proposal.

  - It is ironic or something that few people who are openly concerned
     about credit for their work have enviable reputations.  They tend
     to be inventors of such as IPv8.

  - As far as solving the spam problem is concerned, RMX, SPF, the
     commercial proposals, the MARID proposals, and all other sender
     authentication mechanisms are more like IPv8 than IPv6.  Squashing
     the current modes of spam forgery will have just as much effect
     as the squashing years ago of the forgery of 8-digit user names
     @aol.com.  The new anti-forgery mechanisms are more general than
     the old regular expressions, but sender forgery is not a required
     aspect of spam.  Some large spammers have long been using domain
     names that they register, use for literally a few days, and
     discard.  For example, some time ago I grew bored with accumulating
     the domain names of one such operation in
     http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/bin/group.cgi?group=151
     Some of the domain names of smaller (in counts of names) operations
     are in http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/bin/group.cgi?group=197
     http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/bin/group.cgi?group=30
     http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/bin/group.cgi?group=140 and
     http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/bin/group.cgi?group=165
     Spammers can deploy sender authentication mechanisms far faster
     than their victims.

  - This thread has the wrong subject.  It should be more like
    "How some would-be contributors treat the IETF."

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Hadmut Danisch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:27:06 +0200

[ Sorry, but I couldn't resists to give a nasty side comment:
  Vernon Shryver was one of the persons who most unobjectively and 
  maliciously attacked RMX and any other proposal against Spam. 
  He was displeased because his own invention has major flaws, 
  and that I showed in the RMX draft that his proposal can and 
  is abused for censoring e-mail traffic. His posting appears
  to me as if he took the opportunity for revenge. I'll 
  nevertheless reply to correct some of his misleading and wrong
  statements. ]

First, my name is Danisch, not Danish. 

>      more credit than he already receives.

This is pure nonsense. The same kind of defamation he already used 
on the early asrg mailing list.

I did not cite or credit anyone else because at the time I wrote RMX
I did not know of anyone else's work in this field. RMX is in no way 
derived from or based on anyone else's work. If anyone has any doubt 
about this, I can show that I was working on organizational security, 
especially in context of e-mail, that RMX is just the logical 
continuation of my former work and that I had very good reasons to 
design RMX the way it is. 

How should I have cited or credited someone else's work without
knowing it? And why?

In contrast, SPF and CallerID were provably based on RMX, the authors
were familiar with RMX, and the first version of SPF was explicetely
announced to cover RMX. 

>      before it could be deployed or even tested.

RMX is not the requirement for defining the new DNS RR type. This was
just the proposal how to implement it. 

That's the illogical point of the story: SPF was derived from RMX by 
simply omitting the invention of a new DNS RR type. This didn't change
the idea of RMX, just changed the way to implement it a little
bit. And the same time certain people claimed that SPF is 'new' and
that RMX is wrong because it required a new DNS RR type. 

Typical way of intentional misinformation.

>      to be inventors of such as IPv8.

???

Does anyone have a clue what this is about?

Hadmut Danisch