Comment by eqvinox

5 months ago

> The story is that Carsten Bormann wanted to create an IETF standardized MP version, the creators asked him not to (after he acted in pretty bad faith), he forked off a version, added the aforementioned ill-advised tweaks, named it after himself, and submitted it anyway. All this design by committee stuff is mostly wrong--though IETF has modified it by committee since.

The IETF does not have a committee process. The CBOR RFC has 2 authors, Carsten Bormann and Paul Hoffman. Authors bring documents into the IETF, and the process is basically that everyone bashes¹ on it (the doc, not the people, please) until either there's a reasonable amount of agreement or they give up.

And everyone here means everyone. You could've sent a mail to the mailing list to bash on CBOR. Other MessagePack people could've sent a mail to the mailing list. You could've had comments relayed on the microphone for IETF meetings. Did that happen?

One of very few things that won't fly there is that standardization in general is bad, because the IETF doesn't believe that. But that's only the general argument — "standardizing this particular thing is bad" can and has gone through before. From some sibling comments I see this may have been a major point of contention, but I don't know it was the only one. *If* it is, it's in poor faith to drag this personal dispute into the discussion (I don't know what other disagreements and bad faith there were.)

¹ bashing here means pointing out flaws. It's up to the authors to make text changes to address them.

Aren't there a bunch of emails and what-not about it? I think that's what people are referring to.

EDIT:

> Other MessagePack people could've sent a mail to the mailing list. You could've had comments relayed on the microphone for IETF meetings. Did that happen?

Yes