Re: ECN: Clearing the air (fwd)

Gregory Maxwell
2001-01-28T19:56:20Z

On Sun, Jan 28, 2001 at 02:09:19PM +0000, James Sutherland wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, Ben Ford wrote:
> > Do keep in mind, we aren't breaking connectivity, they are.
>
> Let me guess: you're a lawyer? :-)
>
> This is a very strange definition: if someone makes a change such that
> their machine can no longer communicate with existing systems, I would say
> the person making the incompatible change is the one who broke it.

No. If one day your city decides to make the rode into and out of your
neighorbhood only 1 meter wide, sooner or later someone will expects to drive
a car or truck into the area (rather then a motorcycle), the person city is
at fault for building a non-standard road.

The person who chose to operate a perfectly standard car/truck is not in the
wrong.

> Maybe my mains sockets should be waterproof: it's still my fault when
> pouring water over them causes problems, even if the standards say the
> socket should be waterproof!

No it's not. If you had a waterproof socket, it would certantly be the
makers fault if it wasn't actually waterproof.

I suppose you think I should be tried for murder because my sneeze was an
element that contributed to a weather pattern which caused a monsoon on the
other side of the world and killed people?

It's perfectly reasonable for Linux to impliment an IETF standard.
It's not reasonable for networks to make expectations/decisions about reserved
bits in headers. If you want to break your networks, great, do things like
that. But it's your problem to fix it when it becomes an issue.

They expended effort to willfully break their networks, they can now expend
the effort to fix them. This type of thing is part of the
total-cost-of-ownership of a firewall, it isn't Linux's fault if they were
too foolish to understand they would have ongoing costs.