Re: Complaint to IAB regarding a declaration of consensus to adopt a non-hybrid draft

S Moonesamy writes:
> There was a majority of working group participants in favour of
> adoption.

The notion that a "majority of working group participants" is enough for
a WG decision is directly rejected by the text "Working groups make
decisions through a 'rough consensus' process ... Note that 51% of the
working group does not qualify as 'rough consensus'" in RFC 2418.

Furthermore, your speculation about what "a majority of working group
participants" were thinking seems unlikely to be correct and in any
event is procedurally irrelevant. IETF says all official WG business is
carried out _on the mailing list_.

Perhaps your intention is to summarize what was _said_ on the mailing
list in response to the adoption call. But it's simply not true that a
"majority of working group participants" spoke up in favor of adoption.

During the adoption-call period, there were 22 people stating support
for adoption and 7 stating opposition to adoption. (See my complaint for
names and quotes for verification.) Were these 22 people a majority of
_the people who spoke up_? Yes. Were they "a majority of working group
participants"? No, far from it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250603130154/https://www.ietf.org/about/introduction/
says that "Anyone can participate by signing up to a working group
mailing list"; RFC 2418 says something similar. I skimmed recent list
messages and stopped counting at 100 names.

More fundamentally, the question isn't merely about the level of
support, but also about how _objections_ were handled. RFC 2418 says:
"To achieve the goals of openness and fairness, such conflicts must be
resolved by a process of open review and discussion." The chairs
violated this rule when they moved forward without insisting on
resolution of the objections.

---D. J. Bernstein


===== NOTICES =====

IETF BCP 78, "Rights Contributors Provide to the IETF Trust", provides a
modification right "unless explicitly disallowed in the notices
contained in a Contribution (in the form specified by the Legend
Instructions)".

The official language from IETF's "Legend Instructions"
for the situation that "the Contributor does not wish to allow
modifications nor to allow publication as an RFC" is as follows: "This
document may not be modified, and derivative works of it may not be
created, and it may not be published except as an Internet-Draft."
<https://trustee.ietf.org/wp-content/uploads/Corrected-TLP-5.0-legal-provsions.pdf>

The same language is used in, e.g., RFC 5831. The same language hereby
applies to this document. This is not disclaiming or limiting the
applicability of IETF policies; it is strictly following IETF policies.

Rationale: I'm fine with redistribution of copies of this document. The
issue is with modification, such as (1) IESG's May 2025 posting of an
IESG-mangled version of an appeal that I had filed and (2) IETF
management selling IETF mailing-list text to AI companies.