Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Eric S. Raymond]

Scott W Brim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> However, there appears to be rough consensus emerging that an IPR
> assertion is acceptable if any of the following are true:
>   
>   - a license is explicitly not required.
> 
>   - a license is explicitly free with no restrictions.
> 
>   - a license is explicitly free with rights of "defensive suspension"
>   (what Harald calls "no first use").

This is very close to W3C's policy.  OSI could get probably get behind it,
though the details of "no first use" would have to be carefully specified.
-- 
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Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Scott W Brim]

As Ted says, the IETF should stay out of passing judgment on the
validity of claims and/or fighting patents.  It's really way outside of
our charter.  Anyone can set up a separate organization to do that if
he/she wants.

However, this case is just the worst of many.  It is abundantly clear
that the IETF's current approach of treating each IPR claim on a
case-by-case, ad hoc basis is really hurting us.  I've been involved in
IETF IPR issues for a while and time after time I see Working Groups get
totally stuck trying to evaluate the impact of a particular patent claim
(and then sometimes another, and another ...).

At this point we need more than guidelines.  Our productivity is
suffering because they just aren't effective enough, soon enough.  We
would benefit greatly from something deterministic, IETF-wide.  

Eliminating IPR altogether will be difficult at best, probably
impossible, and I don't think trying to do so is worth our time.
However, there appears to be rough consensus emerging that an IPR
assertion is acceptable if any of the following are true:
  
  - a license is explicitly not required.

  - a license is explicitly free with no restrictions.

  - a license is explicitly free with rights of "defensive suspension"
  (what Harald calls "no first use").

I know of a couple cases where any "encumbrance" at all was considered
unacceptable, but the great majority have found one of these acceptable.

If an IPR assertion falls into any of these categories, then Working
Groups no longer need to consider it as an issue, and no longer should.
They can actually make progress.  What an idea -- to have a general rule
worked out in advance by which you can deal with an IPR issue in one or
two minutes, and then go on.

So that's a proposal: If a claim falls into one of those three
categories it is acceptable, and WGs shouldn't consider it as an issue.  

Let's get some time at the Washington meeting to talk about this.

swb



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isoc's skills

[Dave Crocker]

>  ... I believe that policy concerns are best addressed by
>  ISOC.  Because ISOC's role in the standards process is at one
>  remove, it can work to educate legislatures and
>  administrations without appearing to favor one participant
>  over the other.  

That sounds wonderful, except that ISOC has no significant 
experience in that work and that work requires skill and 
experience.

As has been commented to me repeatedly in recent months, when 
someone in government wants to obtain advice about the Internet 
and about Internet policy, they do not regularly consult ISOC.  
ISOC does not regularly testify in Congress.

And so on.

More generally, as folks postulate spiffy functions for ISOC, it 
might be worth asking where ISOC's expertise for that function 
has been demonstrated.  

That includes minor items like operational administration of a 
standards body.

d/
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Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Ted Hardie]

In this message, I am speaking as an individual participant in the IETF.
For those following the discussion over the past few months, it must
be pretty obvious that I believe that the IETF's role in the world is
distinct from that of the Internet Society, and that I believe that
policy concerns are best addressed by ISOC.  Because ISOC's role
in the standards process is at one remove, it can work to educate
legislatures and administrations without appearing to favor one participant
over the other.  It could take a stand like "public policy is ill-served
by blanket grants of patents whose real validity must be determined
by courts".Working to establish that as a policy statement of ISOC could be
done by discussion in ISOC chapters, by discussion among the members of
ISOC (both organizational and individual), and by discussion with ISOC's board.
I have no doubt that if ISOC were to take on that particular public policy
view, it would draw on individuals who are familiar from IETF contexts to
bolster its case and provide its examples. But it would do so to make 
statements
in an ISOC context, not in the IETF's.

As it stands now, governments use patents to grant monopolies.  That is
a fact of life.  The IETF's goal has long been to write specifications that
the community building and operating the Internet can use.  If the terms of a
specific monopoly mean that the community absolutely cannot use a particular
specification, the IETF must find means to write a different 
specification that the
community can use.  Usually, this means changing the specification so
that the granted monopoly is not in effect.  It may also decide that the
terms related to a specific monopoly do not affect the ability of the 
community to
use the specification, either because the terms are so easy that they
imply no cost or because the need is so great that the cost will have
to accepted.  To reach that decision, it may ask the holder of the monopoly
to give specific terms.   In all of these cases, though, the decision 
is made in
the context of the engineering choices in the specification, not as an abstract
decision which must be applied at all times and in all places.  That
could change, if the IETF decided the effort to determine this on a
case by case basis was too great, but it has not done so to date.

You will notice that the choices above did not include "the IETF can fight
a specific monopoly grant".  I don't think we as a corporate body can in
the common case, though individuals familiar from IETF contexts can and do.
There are several reasons for this, some practical (we don't have the money)
and some organizational (we don't have the right participant mix).
There is also the simple fact that the grant of a patent will have implications
beyond our standards, and so there are elements of the fight which
are literally not our business (note that asking for licensing terms may also
have implications beyond our standards, so there is a gray area here).
Most importantly, though, choosing to fight a patent will be understood
as the IETF judging its participants' external actions.  In any 
organization which
relies on volunteer participation, that has to be taken as a very serious,
very last step.  Disallowing specific participants or acting against 
their interests
based on their articles of faith or their current employer is a strike against
open participation in the IETF's work.   That open participation is, in my
opinion, absolutely critical to the IETF's success.

There are many times in which the IETF process is frustrating for its
participants, because the effort to reach consensus can be extraordinarily
hard.  That it works at all when participants may be from competing
companies or competing camps is a strong statement that its participants
recognize that building a common infrastructure is a common good.
There have been occasions when one set of participants believes another
set are not acting to achieve that common good.  In my opinion,
the best way to handle those situations is by an even-handed application
of the normal rules. If done right, that trains all the participants how to
work together in the IETF context, retaining participants who might
otherwise simply go away.  That may seem frustrating to those who can
imagine how much easier a particular decision would be if only one
or more participants would leave.  But that is short-term thinking;
unlike the usual open source community, our focus on  core  infrastructure
means  that we don't have the same options when we  are thrown together
with those with whom we disagree.  The Internet cannot fork.
We, for a very broad value of we, must work together as best we can.
Again, speaking only for myself,
regards,
Ted Hardie


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Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Ted Hardie]

In this message, I am speaking as the Area Advisor who was responsible
for MARID.
The reasons for closing the MARID working group are set out
in http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg05054.html.
Fundamentally, the working group chairs and I believed that the group
was very unlikely to reach consensus, as it kept re-spinning old arguments.
To boil this very far down, one group felt that it was vitally important that
any anti-forgery additions to email be in some way connected to what a
user sees (i.e., the RFC 2822 headers); others did not agree that this was
necessary or felt strongly that any changes must be made to the RFC 2821
exchange, as this allowed dispositions to be determined without accepting
the DATA.  Attempts to reach consensus on one or the other other of these
positions failed, and attempts to create an infrastructure that would 
allow for both
also did not show much promise of consensus.

The presence of an IPR declaration and license offer related to the 
RFC 2822-based
mechanism muddied the waters, as those who were not in favor of that
approach argued that it implied the group must select the other.  Those who
believed that the RFC 2822-based approach was the best mechanism focused
instead on the viability of the patent application or on the 
acceptability of the
license terms (which, to be fair, seem to have been copied from license terms
that the IETF has found acceptable in other contexts). Despite the efforts of
the chairs, that the two mechanisms  related to very different identities was
largely elided in this discussion, as the group  got bogged down on details of
law that were outside the expertise of all but a  very tiny number of 
participants.

I saw this lack of coherent discussion of the IPR matter as a symptom of the
larger disagreement, not as caused by it.  Were there a very strong consensus
on the right approach, an IPR declaration related to that approach would have
been met with strategies to avoid or accommodate the IPR and offered license.
That it is was met instead with an argument over the abandonment of the
fundamental approach speaks strongly to the consensus of the group on
the work.  It was one symptom, though, among many.  It was not
the cause of the working group's closure.
regards,
Ted Hardie

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Re: Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Hadmut Danisch]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 01:20:33PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Did M$ scan IETF for patent ideas? 
> When was this first written, if you have doc with date, you can
> challenge/share the patent. 

Thanks for the hint. 

M$ was scanning the ASRG-RMX mailing list in fall 2003, because
they replied to one of my postings. So they were aware of RMX long
time before they applied for a patent (the even mention RMX in 
both patents).

regards
Hadmut

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Re: Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[mpkaczor]

Did M$ scan IETF for patent ideas? 
When was this first written, if you have doc with date, you can challenge/share the 
patent.
Maggie

> 
> From: Hadmut Danisch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: 2004/10/05 Tue PM 12:53:03 EDT
> To: "Eric S. Raymond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!
> 
> On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 04:06:18AM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > 
> > When Meng Weng Wong was thinking about how to
> > evangelize SPF, his first instinct was to bypass IETF and go straight
> > to the open-source MTA developers -- I had to lobby hard to persuade
> > him to go through the RFC process, and now I wonder if I was right to
> > do that.
> > 
> 
> 
> The IETF is a problem, but not the worst one. 
> 
> The worst thing in that dirty game was that some were
> "evangelizing" and "lobbying hard". 
> 
> Wasn't it you who partizipated in the SPF marketing show at 
> MIT? Wasn't it you who blamed me for not doing proper marketing?
> 
> Security is about engineering, but not evangelizing, lobbying, or
> marketing. 
> 
> This is what poisoned the whole process, and the IETF is who allowed 
> the process to be poisoned. 
> 
> While I agree that the IETF made awful mistakes and spoiled MARID, 
> I do consider your critics as malicious, because it is exactly
> that what you praise what finally caused all that trouble. 
> 
> Without SPF and Meng's personality show and all that marketing, 
> evangelizing and lobbying, IETF could have finished the work
> and defined an RFC about half a year ago, before M$ could have 
> applied for a patent. And FYI, Meng did not go straigt to the 
> open-source MTA developers. He went to the evil cathedral, not 
> to the bazaar. Don't tell tales here. 
> 
> You'd better not persuaded him.
> 
> Hadmut
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 


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Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Hadmut Danisch]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 04:06:18AM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> 
> When Meng Weng Wong was thinking about how to
> evangelize SPF, his first instinct was to bypass IETF and go straight
> to the open-source MTA developers -- I had to lobby hard to persuade
> him to go through the RFC process, and now I wonder if I was right to
> do that.
> 


The IETF is a problem, but not the worst one. 

The worst thing in that dirty game was that some were
"evangelizing" and "lobbying hard". 

Wasn't it you who partizipated in the SPF marketing show at 
MIT? Wasn't it you who blamed me for not doing proper marketing?

Security is about engineering, but not evangelizing, lobbying, or
marketing. 

This is what poisoned the whole process, and the IETF is who allowed 
the process to be poisoned. 

While I agree that the IETF made awful mistakes and spoiled MARID, 
I do consider your critics as malicious, because it is exactly
that what you praise what finally caused all that trouble. 

Without SPF and Meng's personality show and all that marketing, 
evangelizing and lobbying, IETF could have finished the work
and defined an RFC about half a year ago, before M$ could have 
applied for a patent. And FYI, Meng did not go straigt to the 
open-source MTA developers. He went to the evil cathedral, not 
to the bazaar. Don't tell tales here. 

You'd better not persuaded him.

Hadmut







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Re: Patents (Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!)

[Eric S. Raymond]

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> If it was possible to set up things in such a way that it was easy for a 
> company to declare "no first use" on a patent in the space of standards 
> implementation, and very disruptive for a company to renege on such a 
> promise (for instance, by having all the "no first use" promises by other 
> companies being rendered inoperative), we might get something. but this 
> is just me thinking aloud. I have not been able to get any patent lawyers 
> interested in pursuing/spearheading this train of thought.

In fact, Larry's "go on the offense" proposal appears to be derived from a 
patent-termination-clause concept I invented four years ago, which he later
wrote into the 1.0 versions of AFL and OSL.

It didn't work.  None of the legal departments at IBM or the other 
Fortune-100 corporations with the biggest stake in open source were
willing to go first in sacrificing the "advantage" of being able to 
play multi-billion dollar games of chicken with their portfolios.

So I *have* been able to get patent lawyers interested in 
pursuing/spearheading this train of thought.  And it dead-ended.

Thus, in part, my belief that IETF and W3C and other standards 
organizations must lead on this issue or become irrelevant.
-- 
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Re: Patents (Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!)

[Iljitsch van Beijnum]

On 5-okt-04, at 18:22, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
I have not been able to get any patent lawyers interested in 
pursuing/spearheading this train of thought.
It is generally accepted that the turkey gets no say when deciding the 
christmas day menu.

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Re: Reminder: Poll about restructuring options

[Dave Crocker]

Eliot,


> >  I am trying to imagine any sort of serious protocol
> >  development process that used that sort of logic and then
> >  had acceptance and/or success.
>  Here-in lies the rub.  If you try to use our rules of
>  protocol development to develop an organization we'll never
>  get there.  And you and I agree that there are bigger fish to
>  fry, and right now the kitchen is backing up.


My point was that the level of naivete and irrationality that 
underlie this reorganization process would never be tolerated in 
any serious design effort for specifications.

So I was not talking about "rules".  

I was talking about being deliberate, constructive risk-averse.

We are being none of those.

d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
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Re: Patents (Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On 5. oktober 2004 10:35 -0400 "Eric S. Raymond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
I do think we (the community) have a chance at finding ways to render
those  patents that crop up in the commons harmless.
And what ways would those be?
One posting I found interesting was Larry Rosen's article at Newsforge:

In particular this piece:
MAD
Can we defend against patents by preparing to go on the offense?
During the cold war, nuclear catastrophe was averted by a policy of
mutually assured destruction ("MAD"). If any country dared to start a
nuclear war, the theory went, the devastation wreaked upon that country
would be many times worse. Not just the nuclear powers were so protected.
Through treaties and alliances, the allies of the great powers survived
under a defensive MAD shield.
So too, in the field of patents, do large patent portfolios serve the
role of stockpiled nuclear weapons. If a company with a large portfolio
is sued, it will likely own other patents that are essential to the
company that dared to sue. "Sue me," they say, "and I'll sue you back
even worse for patent infringement." In this way, a patent portfolio can
be a defense to litigation, because few will dare sue and risk their own
destruction.
Big companies, however, don't usually treat patents like nuclear weapons
against their major competitors. Instead, they license their patent
portfolios in return for cross-licenses to their competitors' patent
portfolios. This removes the competitors' arsenals from use for both
offensive and defensive purposes, leaving the cross-licensed companies
free to operate with a reduced fear of patent litigation.
Because such cross-licenses between big patent owners are usually
closely-held trade secrets, it is not easy for us to know if open source
allies will be able or willing to use their patents to defend open source
software. We simply don't know if we're shielded by the MAD patent
portfolios of our best friends.
If it was possible to set up things in such a way that it was easy for a 
company to declare "no first use" on a patent in the space of standards 
implementation, and very disruptive for a company to renege on such a 
promise (for instance, by having all the "no first use" promises by other 
companies being rendered inoperative), we might get something. but this 
is just me thinking aloud. I have not been able to get any patent lawyers 
interested in pursuing/spearheading this train of thought.

  Harald
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Re: The "Clerk" function and Standards throughput and quality

[John C Klensin]

--On Tuesday, 05 October, 2004 13:59 +0200 Harald Tveit
Alvestrand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> John,
> 
> I would like to question some of your assumptions below.
> 
> --On 3. oktober 2004 14:46 -0400 John C Klensin
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
>> Since the discussion about scenarios for structuring the
>> administrative arrangements seem to be settling down, it is
>> probably time to try raising some questions that might really
>> impact the problems that get solved.
>> 
>> The issues raised below interact directly with the problems of
>> getting better-quality standards produced more quickly.
>> Unlike some recent discussions, they address those problems
>> directly, rather than hoping that sufficient administrative
>> reorganization will help by raising the tide.
> 
> I think that we cannot address the questions you raise below
> without the administrative reorganization - simply because
> under the current regime, we have running code that this does
> not get any better.

Sorry.  You misunderstood me.  I believe that the administration
reorg is a _necessary_ condition to being able to seriously
consider some of these other things.  It is not a sufficient
condition.  Also, whether the current admin reorg plan is the
minimum one needed to do the job is a separate question, but may
not be relevant at this point.
 
I believe that most of the rest of our apparent disagreement
stems from this misunderstanding.

>>...
>> It is a tradeoff, and it involves decisions that the current
>> IESG should not be expected to make, if only because most of
>> them have figured out how to work in the current environment
>> and presumably like it (at least to the extent needed to
>> continue).
> 
> We have considered such a model; in fact the General Area
> Review Team (gen-ART) has proved to me that it is possible to
> get a great deal done on a volunteer basis - and even more if
> you get someone to act as "secretary" for it, such as Avri
> Doria is now doing (Thank you, team!)
> (see http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/review-guidelines.html
> for details)

We could quibble about this, and, in particular, about whether
it is/would be adequate for _standards_ processing as distinct
from the things that fall within the General Area.  If it were
both adequate and helpful (at least without fine tuning), the
fact that it is being done in this way only in the General Area
would suggest that the other ADs like the workload, are
incompetent, etc.  I don't believe that, so I have to believe
that the model you suggest won't generalize without tuning, and
that brings me back to me assertion above.

> Such a model would obviously be more stable if we could have
> parts of it moved into a paid-for secretariat.
> 
> But - in the current model, we have been told by the CNRI
> President that the IESG is being unreasonable already in the
> demands made of the secretariat, that no new functions can be
> added without financing for them, and that the only means
> available for getting more resources into the current
> secretariat are raising the meeting fees, getting direct
> sponsors for CNRI's IETF activities, holding exhibitions at
> the IETF and US government funding. Allowing the sponsors who
> currently sponsor the IETF through ISOC to pay for it was not
> an option.

Yes. See above.

>... 
> Again, we have to fix the underlying problems before we can
> pop back up to this level. But once we get there, I don't
> think the current IESG is the biggest obstacle to doing so.
> 
>> However, moving in that direction is incompatible with notions
>> of "it is a generic function and we can contract it out to
>> anyone who provides generic support functions to standards
>> bodies and consortia".  It wouldn't have to be done within the
>> IETF Administrative operation itself, but it would certainly
>> need to be very closely coordinated (much more closely and
>> with much more responsiveness than we usually think of with
>> "contractor") and it would have to be staffed by people who
>> had, at least, a good understanding of the subject matter and
>> relationships in IETF's work.
> 
> I do not see that this follows. All of the items described
> above - checking that people are doing what they promised,
> following up when they do not, checking for adherence to
> formal criteria, sending back reasonably cogent notes when the
> checks fail, and following up - are fairly standard for any
> type of document-producing organization - whether it be a
> consortium, a standards organization or even a technical
> publishing house.

We should have this conversation at another time.  But please
reread my comment above about the incompetence this implies
vis-a-vis you fellow ADs.


>> chance that we want any version of this
>> "standards secretariat" function, we had best make certain
>> that the administrative structure can accommodate it, and
>> that it can do so with little disruption to its basic design
>> parameters.
> 
> A "contractor" would obvio

Re: Patents (Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!)

[Eric S. Raymond]

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I do think we (the community) have a chance at finding ways to render those 
> patents that crop up in the commons harmless.

And what ways would those be?
-- 
http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond

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Re: The "Clerk" function and Standards throughput and quality

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

John,
I would like to question some of your assumptions below.
--On 3. oktober 2004 14:46 -0400 John C Klensin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Since the discussion about scenarios for structuring the
administrative arrangements seem to be settling down, it is
probably time to try raising some questions that might really
impact the problems that get solved.
The issues raised below interact directly with the problems of
getting better-quality standards produced more quickly.  Unlike
some recent discussions, they address those problems directly,
rather than hoping that sufficient administrative reorganization
will help by raising the tide.
I think that we cannot address the questions you raise below without the 
administrative reorganization - simply because under the current regime, we 
have running code that this does not get any better.

At a very high level, Carl's document splits the current
Secretariat task into a meeting planning function and a "Clerk"
one.  There has already been some discussion about nit-picking
the boundary between the two.  But, ignoring that, the Clerk
function can be summarized as "what the secretariat is supposed
to be doing now, if only if worked well".Because the way in
which this is structured may have a profound impact on what we
can and cannot do in the future, I think the community ought to
consider what we really want from that function... or at least
which options we wish to close and which ones we wish to leave
open.
Two examples (there are others, but I am _not_ going to write
another 300+ line note):
(1) Standards Secretariat function: It has been observed
repeatedly that the IESG has too large a workload, with many bad
consequences.  The solution that other standards bodies have
adopted for similar problems involves developing strong
secretariat functions that can provide significant staff support
to the standardization effort itself.   For example, ADs spend
significant time reviewing and checking documents to be sure
that they are structurally ready for Last Call, developing
ballot statements and draft protocol action notices, etc.  In
other standards bodies, the equivalent tasks are done by
interactions between what we call WGs and secretariat staff: in
those models, the AD would see something only when all of the
non-substantive nits, and maybe some of the substantive ones,
were picked and the ducks lined up (or in response to a
complaint about secretariat behavior).  The review committees
called for in various proposals might be appointed or approved
by the ADs, but coordinated by the secretariat: documents could
be sent out for review, and reviews accepted and collated for
AD/ IESG review, with no AD interaction at all.  In extreme
versions of this model, the Secretariat might even have people
with engineering skills on staff who could perform preliminary
technical reviews, check for overlap with other IETF activities,
etc.

The good news about that sort of model is that it could
significantly reduce IESG workload and increase throughput,
especially if we selected ADs who were willing to trust the
Secretariat and let them do the job as outlined.  Doing that
might permit us to put people on the IESG who lacked sufficient
external support to devote most of their lives to the IETF,
which would almost certainly be good.The bad news is that it
is very risky: a number of standards bodies have gone down this
path without adequate management controls and adequate
understandings of boundaries and authority and discovered that
they had ended up with Secretariats who could block anything
they didn't like (or even coming from people they didn't like)
and who might be able to put some proposals at considerable
advantage relative to others.
I suppose it is also obvious that it wouldn't be cheap.  But the
various supporters of the IETF --in dollars or via the in-kind
contributions of the most of the time of senior people-- either
care about throughput and leveraging those dollars or they
don't. If I were the employers of most of the IESG members, I'd
be happy to put some additional number of dollars (Euro, Kroner,
Yen, ...) into the pot if it simultaneously improved IETF
efficiency and got me a significant fraction of the attention of
those people back.
It is a tradeoff, and it involves decisions that the current
IESG should not be expected to make, if only because most of
them have figured out how to work in the current environment and
presumably like it (at least to the extent needed to continue).
We have considered such a model; in fact the General Area Review Team 
(gen-ART) has proved to me that it is possible to get a great deal done on 
a volunteer basis - and even more if you get someone to act as "secretary" 
for it, such as Avri Doria is now doing (Thank you, team!)
(see http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/review-guidelines.html for details)

Such a model would obviously be more stable if we could have parts of it 
moved into a paid-for secretariat.

But - in the c

draft-lyons-proposed-changes-statement-00.txt

[Margaret Wasserman]

Hi Patrice,
I noticed the Internet-Draft that you posted regarding IETF 
Administrative Restructuring, and I have a few comments on it, 
speaking as one interested member of the IETF community to another.

For those who have not seen Patrice's draft, it can be found at:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-lyons-proposed-changes-statement-00.txt
I found the history section of this draft to be quite interesting and 
informative.  Thank you for sharing it.
I think it is important for the IETF community to understand and 
appreciate the huge contributions of many key individuals and groups, 
including Bob Kahn and CNRI, in helping us to achieve our past and 
current success.

The draft also points out CNRI's commitment to supporting the IETF 
through this administrative restructuring process in accordance with 
the consensus of the IETF community.  I would personally like to 
thank you, and especially Bob Kahn, for your contributions to this 
process and for your willingness to support the IETF through this 
transition.

The primary proposal in your draft seems to be that we should 
incorporate the IETF (including the standards function), and ask the 
current IESG to serve as the Board of Directors.  The IETF would then 
hire an Executive Director and contract for administrative services 
directly.

A few others have also suggested that we incorporate the IETF itself, 
rather than defining a separate administrative support function, and 
that possibility was briefly discussed on the IETF list in early 
September (see Harald's September 2nd post with the subject "What to 
incorporate"). On the surface, it seems simpler and more obvious to 
incorporate the IETF than to incorporate a separate administrative 
support function (as in Scenario C), or to organize our 
administrative support function under an existing corporation (as in 
Scenario O).  So, I do think that there is something compelling about 
your proposal.

However, several people have pointed out the importance of keeping 
the cash flow (meeting fees, donations, meeting sponsorships and 
contracts for support services) separate from the IETF standards 
process itself, in order to maintain the independence and credibility 
of our technical work.  It has been pointed out that other major 
standards bodies, such as the IEEE and INCITS/ITS have chosen to 
separate their financial and administrative functions from their 
standards work, and that these groups serve as a model that the IETF 
might choose to follow.  So, it is quite possible that incorporating 
the IETF itself would actually require setting up two separate 
corporations -- a standards function (that deals only with our 
technical work) and an administrative support function (that deals 
with all administrative, financial and contractual matters).

In my personal opinion, one of our paramount concerns in this process 
should be to maintain the integrity and credibility of the IETF as an 
independent standards body, and I believe that maintaining a 
separation between our standards function and our administrative 
support function is vital to maintaining that integrity and 
credibility.  Do you agree that this type of separation is important? 
If so, how would you maintain that separation in your proposal?

If you accept that the standards function and the administrative 
support function should be separate, then it is possible to discuss 
restructuring and formalizing our administrative support function, 
while leaving the IETF standards function as-is -- a loosely-defined, 
unincorporated entity. In my personal opinion, this is the best path 
to follow at this time, as I see no particular benefit to 
incorporating the IETF standards function.  Do you see benefits to 
incorporating the IETF standards function that I may be missing?

Have you had an opportunity to read the Scenario C and Scenario O 
proposals that are currently under discussion on the IETF list?  You 
can find them here:

Scenario C: http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg31321.html
Scenario O: http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg31326.html
I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts and feedback 
regarding these two scenarios, as I believe that you may have a 
unique perspective to offer regarding the organizational, legal and 
functional impacts of these choices.

Thanks again for your contributions to this discussion so far, and I 
hope that you will continue to participate in these discussions as an 
interested and knowledgeable member of the IETF community.

Margaret




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Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Vernon Schryver]

> From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand 

> the MARID WG was shut down because it was unable to reach consensus.
>
> That is, indeed, a failure of the IETF. But not the one you argue.

On the contrary, recognizing the hopeless lack of consensus and
refusing to continue dancing to the tune of various interests was
an outstanding success of the IETF.

The failure by the MARID WG to reach consensus can be viewed as a
failure or a success.  Neither the IETF nor any other voluntary standards
organization can force standards on the world, as the ISO and governments
demonstrated with the OSI protocols.  When consensus cannot be reached,
it is wrong to continue, as the ISO also demonstrated with the OSI
protocols.  One of the worst things that committees (not just standards
committees) can do in such binds is to produce kitchen sink non-designs.
The essence of designing consists of making choices, and that consists
of saying "yes" to one or maybe few things and "no" to almost everything.
When consensus is impossible for making choices, the right response
is to stop spinning.

As has long been true, a bigger danger to the IETF than patents are
the special interests that try to use the IETF for ends unrelated
to ensuring the interoperability of network protocols.  The baloney
started by some SPF advocates and widely repeated by others about
the reasons the MARID WG was shut down are more harmful to the IETF
than embrace-extend-and-patent games, even if such games were in
play, which is not at clear.
 

Vernon Schryver[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Patents (Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

Since I'm not at my best in being clear this week..
I agree very much with ESR that current US IPR practices are a huge 
problem, and that the IETF needs to deal with these issues in a rational 
fashion.

Unlike ESR, I think that it's possible to find such a rational fashion 
within the formal structure of the present IETF IPR rules - that we have a 
number of patents on IETF-specified technology that do not create any 
problem for implementors, and that we need to build on and extend those 
examples into true "best current practices" (the OTHER meaning of the term, 
not "IETF rules").

I don't think the IETF can rid the commons of patents.
I do think we (the community) have a chance at finding ways to render those 
patents that crop up in the commons harmless.

But that's not what keeps me awake nights *this* week
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Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On tirsdag, oktober 05, 2004 00:57:22 -0400 "Eric S. Raymond" 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Dave Crocker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
1. Nothing about the reorganization is going to make IETF
standards be more useful or be produced significantly more
quickly.  Hence, reorganization has nothing to do with the really
serious threats to IETF long-term survival.
Indeed it does not.  I've been lurking on this list for a couple of
months now, and I am fighting an increasing feeling that I am watching
deck chairs being rearranged on the Titanic.
In the last 60 days, the IETF has taken the worst blow to its
credibility that I have observed in the entire history of the
organization.  I refer, of course, to the Sender-ID debacle, which
exposed IETF's inability or unwillingness to defend Internet
standards against patent predation even when the existence of
prior art is readily establishable.
Eric,
the MARID WG was shut down because it was unable to reach consensus.
That is, indeed, a failure of the IETF. But not the one you argue.

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Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Eric S. Raymond]

Eliot Lear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> We're not out to rid the world of patent-laden work, nor are we out to 
> make patent owners rich.  The IETF exists to promulgate relevant and 
> correct standards to the Internet Community, and educate people on their 
> intended safe use. 

You'll talk yourself right into the dustbin of history with that line.
I think that would be very sad, considering the IETF's contributions
in times past.  But it's where IETF seems to be headed now.

Reality check: Apache has 68% market share.  Open-source MTAs handle 85% of
all email traffic.  When Meng Weng Wong was thinking about how to
evangelize SPF, his first instinct was to bypass IETF and go straight
to the open-source MTA developers -- I had to lobby hard to persuade
him to go through the RFC process, and now I wonder if I was right to
do that.

The ground under software standards organizations has been shifting;
significant parts of the commons-creation function that once belonged
to it have moved to open-source project groups like the ASF or xiph.org.
Nowadays, what the Linux kernel hackers do matters a hell of a lot
more to Unix standardization than anything the Austin Group emits.  A
big issue, in this kind of environment, is what traditional standards
organizations have to do and be in order to retain any utility at all.

Certainly it isn't the IETF's job to "rid the world of patent-laden
work".  But you'd better believe that it *is* the IETF's job to ensure
that Internet standards are an open commons, implementable by anyone
without fear they'll be raped and pillaged by hordes of attack
lawyers.  If you don't embrace that mission, you're soon going
to find you have no mission left that some outfit like ASF or 
xiph.org or W3C isn't doing better.

You've had two direct warnings about this -- the ASF and Debian open
letters.  They interpreted IETF's passivity on the Sender-ID patent
issue as damage and routed around it.  If the IETF doesn't get its act
together, that *will* happen again.  The open-source community and its
allies will have no choice but to increasingly route around IETF, and
IETF will become increasingly irrelevant.

I do not want to see this happen.  You shouldn't either.
-- 
http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond

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Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

[Eliot Lear]

Eric,
We're not out to rid the world of patent-laden work, nor are we out to 
make patent owners rich.  The IETF exists to promulgate relevant and 
correct standards to the Internet Community, and educate people on their 
intended safe use.  There is a fine balance to be had between the two 
extremes.  We are only part of the open source community if what you 
mean is that participation is open to all, and our documents are freely 
available to all.  Keep this in mind: the vast majority of participants 
in the IETF are funded by their employers to attend, and MOST of the 
resulting code is NOT open source.

The history of complex standards is that it takes time to get them done 
correctly.  Take a look at MIME, one of the standards that you used in 
the construction of your email message.  That effort was the outcome of 
a huge debate that started in 1990 and didn't get out the door until 
1992, and that was an argument amongst a relatively small group of 
people.  So just because MARID didn't finish doesn't mean the IETF is 
done with spam.

Eliot


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