McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.

Thu Dec 15 21:23:24 PST 1994

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

> People should learn when to yield sometimes....  

I think Tim is getting a bad rap here.

It's one thing to make a mail system that exchanges secure mail, or 
allows you to put pictures in it, or whatever, and it's another thing 
altogether to make a mail system which does all of those things and which 
can actually communicate with the many millions of people out in the real 
world.  It's easy to say, "if everyone listened to me, and did things my 
way, we'd have all these new features."  That may be true, but it's not 
going to happen.  Even the existence of a reasonably well-accepted 
standard like MIME won't ensure success.  What's a standard compared to a 
huge base of installed software?

As influential as Tim is, it doesn't matter whether he embraces MIME or 
not.  If he converted tonight, there'd still be millions of people who 
feel the way he felt this morning.  Getting Tim to capitulate isn't going 
to solve the problem.

The sociology and politics of evolving standards is an important issue on
the net, and it seems to me that things are a little more complicated than
some posters are admitting.  If cypherpunks are going to have an influence
on how things turn out, we're going to have to come to terms with the
issues Tim has been raising.

==
Alex Strasheim | finger astrashe at nyx.cs.du.edu
alex at omaha.com | for my PGP 2.6.1. public key