Subject: Your working group chair is GRUMPY.

From: Bill Sommerfeld <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 13:27:25 -0500

- At the present time, and until further notice, this is the Secure
Shell (secsh) working group, and we're supposed to be working on the
SSH protocol.

 - The abbreviation for this WG is "secsh" because "ssh" was already
taken, by the (now completed) Site Security Handbook WG.  Had Site
Security Handbook gone by a different name, this would have been the
Secure Shell (ssh) working group.

 - Discussions of the validity of various trademarks allegedly owned
by various parties are OUT OF SCOPE for the working group; leave it to
the trademark lawyers.  

 - The WG Last Call I started in February continues, largely because
(for obvious reasons) I haven't had the cycles to sort through,
evaluate, and summarize the comments.  I would find polite, civil
discussion of the technical and process issues already raised to be a
refreshing distraction.

 - There is precedent in the IETF for using standardizing protocols
which have names matching a trademark: PGP and Kerberos were both
trademarked.  There is also precedent for "renaming around the
problem" (e.g., S/Key->OTP); there is also evidence that IETF's
attempts at renaming a deployed protocol often don't "take" (e.g.,
SSL->TLS).

 - At the present time, based both on comments to the mailing list and
to me in private I do not see consensus either for or against renaming
the working group and protocol.

 - I am reluctant to initiate renaming unless I see SMOOTH CONSENSUS.

 - Until we regain consensus on the name of the WG and protocol, the
core documents are GOING NOWHERE.

 - It's fair to say that there are no shortage of possible alternate
names.  Let's not waste time enumerating them until we agree that
renaming is inevitable.  Until we have consensus on the question of
renaming, discussion of possible alternate names for the WG and its
protocols are OUT OF SCOPE.

 - The observed performance of mail forwarding on clinet.fi has been
poor.  It may make sense to move the WG's list somewhere else for this
reason alone.

 - I am NOT AMUSED by the trademark dispute between implementors.  I'd
much rather be (a) writing code for my day job, or (b) getting the
core documents ready to submit to the IESG.

						- Bill