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Re: [Ecrit] PhoneBCP

Stephen,
As was noted in the meeting, it is *always* possible that there are alternative solutions out there when you're talking about the Internet. TCP vs. UDP, POP vs. IMAP, FTP vs. HTTP vs. BitTorrent, SIMPLE vs. XMPP, SASL vs. TLS, S/MIME vs. OpenPGP. None of the many RFCs out there have explicit statements that somebody else might do it differently because it's obvious that they can.
So I don't really think conveying the possibility of other implementations is actually useful at all, technically speaking.
That means that the only real purpose of such a statement is rhetorical, and as we've seen in a few messages here, some people misconstrue the rhetoric to mean that this system has constrained applicability. Given that, I'd rather leave it off unless we can avoid that impression. 

--Richard




Edge, Stephen wrote:

All

I would have thought that motivation should be irrelevant. There are a lot of motives at work here. Should we assume that the document was originally written with only the purest and most altruistic motives (e.g. no thought of business or academic interest at stake)?

The issue is whether the current statement serves a useful purpose in conveying the possibility (well known to be true) of alternative solutions not fully aligned with the current drafts. Nothing in the statement implies that the current drafts are necessarily deficient or that alternative solutions must necessarily be used for some scenarios (even though they optionally can be).

Kind Regards

Stephen
-----Original Message-----
From: ecrit-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:ecrit-bounces at ietf.org] On Behalf Of Randall Gellens
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 9:57 AM
To: Henning Schulzrinne; Stark, Barbara
Cc: ECRIT
Subject: Re: [Ecrit] PhoneBCP

At 11:14 AM -0400 4/28/09, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
It is clear that the text has ulterior motives to restrict the applicability of the document.
From my view, the text does not restrict the applicability, nor is there a desire to do so. The text does clarify the assumptions of the rest of the text in the document, which I think is helpful.