Subject: URL to "The Squeeze Is On At IETF"

From: "Steven Clift" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 1997 11:10:41 +0000

You may have missed this, I did.  Here is an article from Internet 
Week on the IETF in November:

	http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?INW19971103S0106

Are others aware of similar articles that present or explain the 
inner workings of the IETF in a more journalistic way?

Thanks,
Steven Clift

Here is a clip:

                 November 03, 1997, Issue: 688
                 Section: Trends

                 The Squeeze Is On At IETF

                 Kelly Jackson Higgins

                 The strain on the Internet Engineering Task Force was
                 showing. It was the summer of '96 and representatives
                 from Lotus, Microsoft and Netscape Communications
                 were all sitting down to powwow for the first time
                 about creating an IETF standard for electronic
                 calendaring. The public posturing and jockeying that
                 led up to the meeting were just one more marketing
                 mini-drama sullying the IETF's reputation as an
                 engineering organization.

                 You could cut the tension in the room with a knife:
                 Months of sweat and code were at stake, and corporate
                 users were pushing the industry titans to open up
                 their proprietary calendaring packages so they could
                 schedule meetings electronically with people outside
                 the company. That long, hot meeting last summer broke
                 the ice for what soon will become the IETF iCal
                 protocols, which will let a Netscape Communicator
                 user set up a meeting with a colleague who runs
                 Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Organizer.

                 Sounds simple, but the iCal specs took nearly two
                 years to get off the ground; the bickering finally
                 stopped so the IETF techies could roll up their
                 sleeves and get to work. And iCal is only one battle
                 in a series of standards wars the IETF (www.ietf.org)
                 has waged since the epic commercialization of the
                 Internet.

                 The group, which was formed by engineers in the 1980s
                 to build protocols for the Internet, is struggling to
                 maintain its identity as an engineering group and not
                 end up as an extension of the marketing department at
                 Cisco, Microsoft or Netscape.

                 Traditional IETFers from MIT and other universities
                 are feeling the squeeze and pushing back to keep the
                 group's roots intact from a new generation of
                 participants that has a lot more at stake-namely
                 market share.

                 IETFers admit it can be hard to keep their paychecks
                 from influencing their engineering instincts.

end of clip
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