> I let my membership expire years ago and haven't seen a reason to
> rejoin...ever.
>
> If you are not a member of the ACM, you can read it in ACM
> Queue, in which it
> was published in January:
> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2090149
Yes, and people can even comment there, too. Looks like a few already
have. However, it is unlikely that the ACM staff will read those
comments unless this is brought to their attention, so I agree with
you in general:
> I somehow feel this is a very
> distorted view of what really happened. Perhaps
> it would be good if somebody
> "official" wrote a Letter to the Editor
> (Communications of the ACM publish
> them in every issue)?
However, I myself will not send them a letter. If an organization
with the size and reputation of ACM cannot self-police their own
authors before publishing, then they do not have a high reputation
after all, and it is not worth my time writing a dispute to them.
However, others might want to...
I want to make it very clear that we tried very hard to get this
resolved correctly with the right organizations. They left no leeway.
The IETF and IEEE way is "Only we build standards, and then we invite
vendors to add IPR statements for things they snuck in".
Early on, the CARP codebase was basically a VRRP clone. Developers
wanted it into the tree; something like it was needed for pfsync to
work well.
Normally we don't care about patents, but this situation was risky.
VRRP was the *very first* standard that the IETF accepted a IPR
statement for; it was the start of the RAND scheme of allowing
standards to have patent claims; of mandating the publishing of the
rights-holders by name in the standard document; the IETF/ISG were
playing a game with the vendors to make sure that patent statements
were in the face of anyone trying to follow the standards, so that
they could not later claim they did not know. It was corporatism to
the top. IETF claims having those IPR statements there is not their
own claim, but that position is retarded.
What if tomorrow I requested IETF to add a Theo de Raadt IPR statement
to about 20 standards. They'd laugh at me. For the big boys though,
they bend you over.
Since VRRP was the first one, we had to be careful, and it was
valuable to try to improve the situation through politics.
Secondly, at the time Cisco and Alcatel were in a big battle over various
patents, and the Cisco HSRP / VRRP IPR bullshit was included, not just
as the foundation of the IETF IPR model, but as an item on its own. We
did not want to get dragged in.
So that is why CARP became incompatible. Some developers, primarily
Ryan McBride, intentionally build a protocol that would point-by-point
avoid any of the claims of the patents Cisco / HP / IBM held here, and
then he adapted the proposed VRRP clone code to that new model. At
the same time I continued laying on political pressure to find another
way. Eventually we had to get ports and services to make CARP and
pfsync work nicely, and then IANA stood up and did not want to talk
about the situation because we had not followed the process of only working
through IETF.
In that model, only rich companies can design protocols on an open
internet. Not a world I want to live in. Any vendor can decide if
they want our stuff to pollute their network. Somehow, in 2005
FreeBSD and other projects decided they did, partially because the
VRRP patents did worry them too.
I dug a bit into the archives, and wow there is some crazy stuff to
show. I cannot show it as a whole, since a lot of people at vendors
also affected by the patents did stick their necks out to try to solve
this, and it would require substantial editing to clean it.
But I can show some bits, if they are mostly by me. Here is a mail
from early on showing how neither IETF nor Cisco wanted to improve the
situation. This mail is mostly written by me (I did fix one spelling
error), which makes it easier to show; it shows what we wanted to
solve. It shows that we are not babies, but much more grown up and
trying to be responsible to society than the companies trying to fuck
everyone over. It is better than my normal form, so some other
developer must have helped me write the mail.
Yes, this mail is in response to private but cc'd mails sent by two
very big organization heads. I don't care if that makes them unhappy.
The points I make in this mail are way bigger than their positions.
If you are not familiar with their names you'll need to google a bit
to realize I was talking to "The Right People" (even if they kept
saying they are not). For one of them, check out how the revolving
door works:
Fred Baker <f...@cisco.com>
and
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Baker_(IETF_chair)
That is what we are up against. I also did talk a lot to Robert
Barr. None of it was going anywhere.
So I was there, fighting that patent battle -- and we tried to do it
by going after the *very first network patent* recognized by people who
lied about being about standards.
And where was George V. Neville-Neil? According to his resume he was
working for Wind River in their VxWorks network group, which means he
was working on a software product designed to be sold to these kinds
of big vendors influencing IETF, IEEE, and IANA, so you can follow the
money and realize why he was quiet about patents then, and now accuses
those who fight patents. He does not understand that it is people
just like him, making loads of money, that are the real problem, and
that he is just not qualified to rewrite history.
By the way, nowadays he is also on the board of directors of the FreeBSD
Foundation:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=30292
Partisan politics? No, you don't say.
------
From: Theo de Raadt <dera...@openbsd.org>
To: Fred Baker <f...@cisco.com>
cc: Bob Hinden <hin...@iprg.nokia.com>
Subject: Re: VRRP and OpenBSD
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 25 Aug 2001 09:47:15 +0800."
<5.1.0.14.2.20010825094457.01f11...@mira-sjcm-2.cisco.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 21:48:11 -0600
From: Theo de Raadt <dera...@cvs.openbsd.org>
> At 04:33 AM 8/25/2001, Bob Hinden wrote:
> >They also view that statements on the IETF web site and in the VRRP RFC as
> >the IETF having validated Cisco's claims.
>
> I have forwarded your note to corporate counsel, which is the folks that
> handle these issues. In many respects, I'm just another engineer at Cisco
> when it comes to the business side of things.
Thanks.
> That said, the above statement is preposterous. The IETF statement is that
> Cisco has asserted that certain things are true. Whether Cisco's assertion
> is in fact true is not the IETF's to say.
Unfortunately, IETF including such a statement in their literature
will be interpreted by a court as us having been informed before
implimenting. Secondly, courts may be stupid, but the fact that a
body of engineers as large as IETF saw no problem with such claims,
and took no particular issue, will serve in part as validation of the
existance of such claims. Even if IETF goes out of it's way to say
that no such validation is happening.
I consider this similar to how IETF had to get involved in the SSH
trademark issue last year. It may be IETF's wish to avoid such
things, but there are many of us who will actively try to prod IETF
into doing the right thing.
An internet depending on protocols that can only be implimented if you
hold a large patent portfolio? How completely obsurd.
Now, in the future, IETF is in a position to avoid such things from
the start. Now that VRRP is a standard, the only way I feel for us to
be heard in the future is for us to destroy VRRP by purposely
producing incompatible versions which avoid the patent. Let us create
an example. You may not agree with such a direction, but hey, in our
eyes doing so is not a "win vs. lose" situation, but rather a "win
vs. cannot lose" situation.
In any case, I suspect that these types of issues are going to pop up
with increased frequency in IETF proceedings.
Anyways, thanks for your help.
