"You could argue that the IETF has become everything the ISO working groups used to be, and that 'rough consensus and running code' is long gone."
Yes you could, I was there in the trenches trying to urge them not to go down that road. I really lost it when we had gotten Sun to release all claim to any rights to the XDR or RPC code libraries so that IETF could endorse it as an 'independent' standard. There were enough implementations out there, a regular connectathon which tested interoperability. Paul Leach, who made it his life's work to prevent any sort of standardization of RPC, successfully rallied Microsoft to overwhelm the otherwise rational members of the IETF and de-rail that process. It was so blatant, and so petty. I remember telling Vint Cerf that I marked that day, and those events, as the death of the IETF as a body with any integrity. Many working groups soldiered along and did well until they became 'strategic' to some big player, and then their integrity too was ripped out of them. Sort of like that movie 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Very sad.
Over the years I've toyed briefly with starting a new networking working group.
Yes you could, I was there in the trenches trying to urge them not to go down that road. I really lost it when we had gotten Sun to release all claim to any rights to the XDR or RPC code libraries so that IETF could endorse it as an 'independent' standard. There were enough implementations out there, a regular connectathon which tested interoperability. Paul Leach, who made it his life's work to prevent any sort of standardization of RPC, successfully rallied Microsoft to overwhelm the otherwise rational members of the IETF and de-rail that process. It was so blatant, and so petty. I remember telling Vint Cerf that I marked that day, and those events, as the death of the IETF as a body with any integrity. Many working groups soldiered along and did well until they became 'strategic' to some big player, and then their integrity too was ripped out of them. Sort of like that movie 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Very sad.
Over the years I've toyed briefly with starting a new networking working group.