[Ietf-not43] Is it just me or is there a desire here to avoid the chair's request..

[Eric A. Hall]

on 8/19/2003 11:00 AM Andrew Newton wrote:

> This is a point that keeps getting glossed over by the LDAP crowd here. 
> Most of us already have our own databases and loading and replication 
> procedures.  RIPE has this nifty software that does incredibly fast 
> radix indexing specifically to solve their unique problems.  We have a 
> couple of million dollars invested in custom global replication 
> technology.  I know our competitors have also spent tons of money fine 
> tuning their systems for their operations.
>
> The point is, that for the people standing up these servers, LDAP is 
> only a protocol.  The implementations are nice, but they don't help us.

The other point that keeps getting glossed is that there are a huge number
of potential providers in a directory of Internet resources, not all of
whom are going to be affected by these restrictions. If we start getting
into things like having organizations run public directory partitions for
things like public keys or mail-routing data or whatever, then it doesn't
make sense to REQUIRE that these people also pay the costs required for
your line-of-business in particular, but that's what you're advocating.
Essentially your argument is "my business makes me build and manage
complex distributed database so everybody else should too, dammit!", which
is not only ridiculous and obscene but is ultimately going to be a major
hurdle towards the directory actually getting used for a whole lot more
than what we've got today.

Look, I'm all for Direct Democracy and having constituents vote their
interests, but that decision process depends heavily on the constituents
accurately representing the affected community and being informed about
the choices. IMO, we have satisfied neither of these considerations at
this point. Instead, we have a vocal mob from a demographically-tiny
group, most of whom apparently haven't even read the specs.

My feeling at this point is that we'd be best off by going with some
representative democracy. Let's recruit some people who we know can think
beyond their immediate benefits and who have the technical chops to
understand the longer term issues.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/