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15 changes: 15 additions & 0 deletions draft-edm-protocol-greasing.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -316,6 +316,21 @@ This reduces the effectiveness of grease values in removing
existing ossification, but can still have benefits for flagging issues in new implementations
when they receive grease values.

## Discouraging Ossification

Greasing alone can help ensure that middleboxes tolerate unrecognized extensions rather than
crashing, but one common middlebox behavior is to simply drop all unrecognized extensions.
Techniques such as disabling greasing when errors are encountered can enable communication
but may not provide enough incentive to discourage ossification.

One approach to preserving the incentive to grease without being blamed for doing so,
while still potentially discouraging ossification is to make any such ossification visible.
For example, a sender can log and report ossification issues on a given path
when falling back to non-grease values. Or a receiver can log and report communication
that does not include grease values. Such reports might be used in social feedback
(e.g., public product or service reviews), or in contractual business relationship (e.g., SLA)
discussion, in order to provide an incentive to implementers or deployers of ossified implementations.

# Considerations for Increasing Protocol Variability {#variability}

Greasing can maintain protocol extensibility by falsifying active use of its
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