[ih] "The Great Debate"

[Brian E Carpenter]

What I remember about "many fine lunches and dinners" is that at the Stockholm
IETF meeting in July 1995, the IAB held a very fine working** dinner in a private
room at a ground-floor restaurant near the convention centre. What we hadn't
realised was that we were very visible, as we ate and drank, for everyone walking
between the meeting venue and the various hotels. We heard a lot of remarks
about our conspicuous fine dinner the next day. The Open Book was well known
at the time, and the fine lunches and dinners had made into the Tao of the IETF
(RFC1391) - but misquoted, because the original context was to distinguish
Doers from Goers. I will leave Geoff to explain that if he wants to.

** I swear we were working hard throughout the meal.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 30-Apr-26 13:16, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history wrote:
> any vigorous enmity at that IETF meeting directed towards Marshall Rose for
> the part in "The Open Book" regarding The IETF standards processes, the
> "many fine lunches and dinners", et al. should be summarily (re-)directed
> towards yours truly... who ghost wrote that section of "The Open Book"
> 
> if your wondering about/what/why might have been the "inspiration" for
> doing it... well it was Exactly The Same Impetus of yours truly
> facilitating and launching the Internet Crucible publication, as summarily
> explained, detailed and exampled in:
> 
> https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2025-April/010449.html
> 
> g
> 
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2026 at 11:35 AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 4/26/2026 5:26 PM, Carl Malamud via Internet-history wrote:
>>> In regards to Marshall and the OSI question, he gave a memorable speech
>> at
>>> an IETF plenary about how he had implemented OSI and he considered it to
>> be
>>> road kill in motion. He got a standing ovation from Jon Postel and
>> others.
>>
>>
>> Assuming we are thinking of the same event, this was Marshall's first
>> time at an IETF and his presence and his presentation were carefully
>> arranged.
>>
>> Marshall was working for me, at the time, and had just published his
>> wonderful tome, The Open Book, about OSI.
>>
>> It included some discussion of standards processes, including reference
>> to the IETF.  I'm not finding the relevant text that he made about
>> standards processes but it included a summary assessment that these
>> meetings were marked by "many fine lunches and dinners".
>>
>> He later reported that the OSI folk who read the book pretty much nodded
>> in agreement with his characterization of the standards work.
>>
>> However many fine IETF folk took vigorous exception.  So there was some
>> community anger with Marshall.
>>
>> His appearance at the Hawaii IETF was intended to mend the fence.  His
>> presentation was stellar in form and content and was thoroughly successful.
>>
>> A bit of icing happened when I walked by a small group discussing what
>> turned out to be final plans for the meeting t-shirt.  I injected the
>> suggestion that at the bottom of the shirt's graphic, they should add
>> "Many fine lunches and dinner" and they did.  And at the Plenary, they
>> made a formal presentation of a shirt to Marshall.
>>
>> d/
>>
>> --
>> Dave Crocker
>>
>> dhc at dcrocker.net
>> bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
>> mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
>> +1.408.329.0791
>>
>> Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
>> Northern California Coastal Region
>> Information & Planning Coordinator
>> American Red Cross
>> dave.crocker2 at redcross.org
>>
>>
>