Re: AMS - IETF Press Release
Phillip Hallam-Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The angle braces proposal was a typically clueless one in the first place. It does not make the problem of identifying a URL any easier. I disagree. Note for example that http://example.com/, is a perfectly valid URL different from http://example.com/. Nevertheless it is often desirable to use URLs in sentences where a comma which is not part of the URL immediately follows the URL with no intervening whitespace. The strong consensus of users is that cut and paste should work for URLs in email clients. Blame the lazyness of the email client providers, not the users. Has the bug been reported to the email client providers? Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv4 Outage Planned for IETF 71 Plenary
Sam Hartman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Norbert == Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Norbert Iljitsch van Beijnum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But what about transition mechanisms, or would that be unfair? Norbert IMO it would be unfair on IPv6 to do the test without We should provide transition mechanisms only if we believe they are a good idea. So far I think we want to recommend dual stack. So, we need to think about this outage more as a way to get ourselves experience with IPV6, not as a network configuration anyone should be expected to use on a regular basis. Dual stack is a transition mechanism. The idea is that ISPs provide dual-stack service up to the customer edge for some time, during which a gradual migration to v6 takes place, ideally without end users being forced to pay attention to any changes. If this works out, after this phase there would be phase in the transition during which ISPs no longer provide v4 service up to the customer edge, but provide for some other sort of transition mechanism to allow their customers to communicate with the IPv4-only hosts that still exist. I believe that it is that second transition phase that this test should aim to simulate. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv4 Outage Planned for IETF 71 Plenary
Phillip Hallam-Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: what is proposed here is more of the nature of a PR stunt, a proof of concept than a test of a transition strategy. I agree that it cannot be a true test of a transition strategy since the main problem with any transition strategy is the meachnism for somehow influencing those who don't particularly care about the opinion of those who try to tell everyone else what the transition strategy should be. PR stunts can be good, but they can also have the opposite effect if you don't know what is going to happen. I have been involved in several 'public' interop events at conferences. There is no way I would be within a hundred feet of one, let alone participate if I did not have absolute certainty in advance of what the result was going to be (yes there is usually a pre-interop before hand). +1 Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Incentives for using v6 (was Re: IPv4 Outage Planned...)
Eliot Lear [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think the thing people are struggling with is much more basic: individuals don't get anything by moving to v6. With wireless I got freedom from having to stick a cable here or there. Maybe we should hand out lollipops or something for those who use v6. I totally agree with your line of thinking, and I'd propose that the one incentive for using v6 which would successfully convince end users to switch to v6 would be if that way, they could get a (subjectively at least) much faster connection at the same price. The key question therefore is this: Are we able to influence the majority of the large ISPs to do something like that? Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv4 Outage Planned for IETF 71 Plenary
Iljitsch van Beijnum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But what about transition mechanisms, or would that be unfair? IMO it would be unfair on IPv6 to do the test without setting up transition mechanisms similar to what an ISP would supply when trying to sell IPv6-only internet connectivity (in the sense of not dual-stack to the customer edge) to end-users. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
OOXML (was Re: Should the RFC Editor...)
Iljitsch van Beijnum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sorry for the complete change in subject, but I think it's important to avoid confusion here: On 1 dec 2007, at 12:22, Frank Ellermann wrote: Disclaimer, I like Excel on boxes where it's available, it's a nice product. But it's not nice enough to say that 1900-02-29 was day 60 in year 0, if that's what the 6000 ooXML pages say (I only looked at some nits in the BSI Wiki, I never read any page of the huge draft). What are you trying to say here? There never was a februari 29 in 1900 so giving that non-existant day a number would be problematic. From your statement, I assume there is a standard that does this, but I'm not sure which one and why. Could you enlighten us? I'm not sure how much enlightenment is possible with regard to such a silly issue, but having participated in the discussion of this issue in the concerned standardization committee of the Swiss Association for Standardization, I'm able to provide a bit of background information: First of all, I wouldn't call the OOXML specification a standard (Ecma-glorified documentation would be a more fitting description of what it really is, IMO), but it is true that the OOXML spec requires the famous one-off bug in the common day and time representation for weekdays and day numbers for all days before March 1, 1900 which can be represented at all in that common day and time representation (days before January 1, 1900 are not allowed at all). The justification which Microsoft gives for this quirk is that they don't want to fix this bug because they consider it unacceptable to break Excel macros which rely on the buggy behavior. Also, Microsoft points out that besides the 1900 base date system which has this bug, the OOXML spec provides an alternative, called the 1904 base date system which avoids the bug, at the cost of disallowing all dates before January 1, 1904. Of course, if the goal had been to produce a reasonable standard, they could simply have re-used an existing standard date representation format, or they could have defined a new one which is able to express all valid dates of the Gregorian calendar without such a one-off bug, and they could have introduced a legacy behavior compatibility mode for macro execution which reproduces the buggy behavior. The one-off bug in the first two months of the year 1900 may not be a big problem for most of Microsoft's customers, but it becomes a serious issue when someone who considers OOXML to be a standard wants to represent earlier dates in a way which is compatible. In the discussions in the Swiss Association for Standardization, Microsoft expressed willingness to agree to a reasonable comprimise regarding this point, namely to deprecate that 1900 date base system which has that bug, and to recommend for general use the modification of the 1904 base date system that is obtained from the system described in the OOXML spec by dropping the restriction that the day number must be positive. By the way, there is another serious issue with OOXML's common day and time representation format: Regardless of the base date, that day and time representation is fundamentally broken on all days which are 23 hours or 25 hours long rather than the usual 24 hours. (In many countries that occurs twice per year, due to switching to DST or back.) Regarding that issue Microsoft did not express any willingness to compromise. Shortly after the meeting in which these discussions were held, a very large number of Microsoft certified gold partners joined that standardization committee, admittedly encouraged to do that by Microsoft corporation, all of them voting for the viewpoint that the OOXML spec is fine as-is for approval as an international standard, without any need for discussion or fixing of the various technical and other issues that had been raised about OOXML. So many of them joined that they reached 3/4 majority, thereby rendering the previous technical discussion essentially irrelevant. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Should the RFC Editor publish an RFC in less than 2 months?
Hallam-Baker, Phillip [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Only issue I would raise here is don't expire the ID if this situation arises... If there is an IESG action and an ID folk can read that is going to work for most people. Don't publish the rfc before the appeals counter expires, there lies all sorts of bad stuff and confusion. +1 Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Should the RFC Editor publish an RFC in less than 2 months?
John C Klensin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't see any possible reason why we need to give people two months to get an appeal filed: a month or, at most, six weeks ought to be more than sufficient. +1 Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Westin Bayshore throwing us out
John C Klensin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: FWIW, if the enemy is renovations, or even huge and noisy construction projects across the street or in adjacent buildings, a model of going repeatedly to the same venues and building relationships would not help us get more than better-quality sympathy. Hotel behavior is not a coin-toss, even with the same hotel. If there have been no renovation projects for several years in a row, that actually increases the odds that there will be one next time, rather than assuring that there will not be. The point is that if IETF meetings are potentially repeat business for a hotel, that gives the hotel an otherwise-absent strong incentive to do such a good job that we'll want to hold another IETF meeting there. From the hotel's perspective, making sure that we don't get inconvenienced by renovations or other avoidable disruptions would be one aspect of that. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Reminder: Offer of time on the IPR WG agenda for rechartering
Lawrence Rosen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In any event, these email lists have elicited more comments than any meeting in Vancouver could properly address. How do we intend to move toward consensus? I think it is clear from the discussions that while there is no consensus that the current way of doing things is adequate, there is also little to no hope for reaching a consensus anytime soon for a comprehensive set of changes that would fully resolve the existing concerns with regard to standards-track and other RFCs describing protocols and data formats which for patent reasons cannot fully be implemented in open source and free software. The only way forward therefore seems to be to seek to identify relatively small changes for which rough consensus can be reached and which are helpful already for reducing the problem or resoving some aspects of it. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices
Brian E Carpenter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007-10-26 06:09, Norbert Bollow wrote: For an extreme example, consider hypothetically the case that an essential part of the IPv6 protocol stack had such a patent issue. To be blunter than Ted, this is a problem that the GPL community has to solve, not the IETF. *If* in some way a standard for patent licenses gets chosen which is strict enough to guarantee compatibility with the concept of copyleft open source / free software, but which however turns out not to guarantee compatibility with the GPL, then I agree that it is acceptable to say the remaining part of the problem is something that the GPL community has to solve, for example by creating a GPLv4 which is compatible with a larger set of patent licenses than GPLv3 is. However, in practice, incompatibility issues between patent licenses and any version of the GPL which has been published so far are not typically the result of specifics of how the GPL implements the concept of copyleft, but rather the incompatibility issues usually result from those patent licenses being incompatible already with the basic concept of open source / free software. Combining such a patent license with a copyright license of any kind for some program cannot possibly result in a program which is open source / free software. Therefore copyleft licenses must by definition be incompatible with such patent licenses. The question is this: Is copyleft open source / free software so unimportant with regard to any area of internet standards that it would be justifiable to adopt any specification with fundamentally incompatible patent situation as a standards-track RFC? I believe that the answer to this question very clearly is no! For justification of this position I point to the facts that Microsoft is clearly acting like it perceives copyleft open source / free software to be the main threat for their near-monopoly market position, and that in the domain of networking equipment where there is not a problem with a Microsoft near-monopoly, a very similar problem nevertheless exists from the perspective of developing countries. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices
Theodore Tso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 10:58:32AM +1300, Brian E Carpenter wrote: On 2007-10-25 08:32, Ted Hardie wrote: At 10:02 AM -0700 10/24/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote: Ted Hardie wrote: And that will never fly (IANAL) with the GPL and so here we sit at an impasse again. So either a GPL implementation is important to interoperability in a given space or it is not. If it is important to interoperabilty, then this is a showstopper. If not, maybe not. Hope that helps restore context for you. I would argue that a GPL implemention is not important to interoperability testing as long as there is a BSD-licensed implementation. In fact, to the extent that all or most of the commercial products are based off of the same BSD-licensed code base, this can actually *improve* interoperability. (I may have been awarded the 2006 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software, but if my goal were to make sure that specification was going to get widely adopted, I'd use a BSD license, not a GPl license, for the reference implementation.) I don't disagree with anything that you wrote, but the point here is that if there's a patent with GPL-incompatible licensing, you don't have permission to link that BSD-licensed code into a GPL-licensed program and distribute the result. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices
Theodore Tso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't disagree with anything that you wrote, but the point here is that if there's a patent with GPL-incompatible licensing, you don't have permission to link that BSD-licensed code into a GPL-licensed program and distribute the result. And I would argue that the above issue is not a matter of concern to the IETF. Having a reference implementation to encourage adoption of the spec, that is of IETF's concern. The issue of GPL requirements is, I would argue, Not Our Problem. Is it really your position that that is in no case a concern that IETF should consider??? For an extreme example, consider hypothetically the case that an essential part of the IPv6 protocol stack had such a patent issue. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices
Scott Kitterman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And that will never fly (IANAL) with the GPL and so here we sit at an impasse again. So either a GPL implementation is important to interoperability in a given space or it is not. If it is important to interoperabilty, then this is a showstopper. If not, maybe not. Do you have any specific example of an internet standard for which you think that lack of GPL-compatible licensing of any (perhaps just hypothetical) relevant patents would not cause interoperability serious problems if the patent holder chose to aggressive enforce the terms of that non-GPL-compatible patent license? Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices
Phillip Hallam-Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would accept GPL 2.0, but not GPL without any qualifier such that the IETF was required to comply with whatever scheme RMS has thought up this week to reinsert himself at the center of attention. I wouldn't have any objections to a policy which establishes the criterion of GPLv2 compatibility in addition to compatibility with proprietary closed-source software. It would IMO be better however to formulate the criterion in a way which avoids explicitly mentioning GPLv2. Rather, I would suggest to adopt a policy formulation that tells as explicitly as possible how to check whether the terms of a patent license or patent non-assertion promise are acceptable. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices
Ted Hardie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No. My point was that for the IETF, interoperability is the goal, not some general statement about goodness of Free software. In many/most/maybe all cases, this will require any IPR restrictions to be GPL compatible. Can you think of an open-source project interested in the work of CCAMP? I don't know of an existing open-source project interested in this, but I would suggest that it is very important that it must be possible to start one. Otherwise we deny in particular people in developing countries the freedom to develop, by means of an open-source / free software project, the ability to extend purchased networking equipment with systems of their own design. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]
John C Klensin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --On Monday, 22 October, 2007 21:57 +0200 Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: John C Klensin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Larry, with all due respect, if you substitute ISO/IEC JTC1 or IEEE (at least in the computer and communications areas for both) in the above statements, they will still be true. The IETF is not particularly special in this regard. But the IETF seems to be singled out, in Larry's recent notes and elsewhere, as the one body that needs to treat these things differently. I can't speak for Larry, but maybe the reason for his focusing on IETF is our culture of agreeing on how things should be done and then (generally) acting accordingly? By contrast e.g. ISO/IEC JTC1 is not following its own policy on patents in any consistent way. I agree. There are very good reasons to insist in all fora where standards for protocols and data formats are developed that such standards must not be patent-encumbered. But I see no evidence, at least in the ISO-level correspondence that I follow, that they are being pursued with equal persistence anywhere else. I suspect that is because the Member Bodies refuse to keep taking the question up over and over again I've spoken not too long ago with the official of the Swiss Association for Standardization (our country's Member Body of ISO) who is responsible for that kind of thing, and he said that when there's a clear example of a patent-encombered standard of some significance that gets approved at the ISO/IEC JTC1 level, he's willing to have Switzerland initiate an appeal against that decision on the basis of patented standards being harmful to international commerce. He expressed confidence that we would win that appeal. However the economic importance of insisting that standards must not be patent-encumbered is increasing. Therefore the decisions of the past can not validly be accepted as strong arguments against Larry's current initiative. First, no persuasive evidence has been produced on this list that this economic importance is, in fact, increasing. Ok, I'll write up an argument in support of my above assertion. I also note that we can easily get onto a slippery slope here. Many companies view the GPL to be an encumbrance no less severe than the patent policies of other companies. Perhaps it is even more severe because encumbrances associated with patents that can be made to go away by the payment of money are less complicated to deal with (if one is willing to spent the money) than encumbrances under the GPS, which just don't go away. Would you recommend that IETF not permit any materials that might be encumbered under the GPL, etc.? I would recommend that in order to be considered acceptable, implementation in GPL'd free software as well as implementation in proprietary closed-source software must both be allowed by the licensing terms of any patents. Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices
Simon Josefsson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think the solution here is to come up with a reasonable definition of free that would fail to be met in the specific case of BOCU. I don't think it is an impossible problem to solve. How about 'Should be possible to implement without having to pay for a patent license'? That's IMO not quite strong enough. There are patent licenses which don't require to pay a fee but which impose other conditions that are so severe that having to pay a fee would be by far the lesser evil. How about: 'Should be possible to implement without having to ask for permission or pay a fee'? Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]
John C Klensin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But we're talking here about IETF standards, specifications that are prepared cooperatively and for free by talented individuals, companies and countries around the world. These specifications are intended for implementation everywhere to facilitate communications among us all. ... Larry, with all due respect, if you substitute ISO/IEC JTC1 or IEEE (at least in the computer and communications areas for both) in the above statements, they will still be true. The IETF is not particularly special in this regard. I agree. There are very good reasons to insist in all fora where standards for protocols and data formats are developed that such standards must not be patent-encumbered. To me, the question is simply one of whether trying to insist on an unencumbered regime (whether for technical, economic, or moral/ religious reasons) is important enough to justify rejecting, a priori, any encumbered technology. The IETF has decided, repeatedly, that the answer is no and we want to look at these things on a case-by-case basis and evaluate the tradeoffs. While the part that follows the no differs, that is the same conclusion reached by ISO, IEC, IEEE, and others. However the economic importance of insisting that standards must not be patent-encumbered is increasing. Therefore the decisions of the past can not validly be accepted as strong arguments against Larry's current initiative. If you want to pursue this further, I think it would be helpful if you started supplying arguments that we haven't heard, repeatedly, before. Do you have a list of the arguments that you have heard so often already that you're not interested in hearing them again? Greetings, Norbert. -- Norbert Bollow [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://Norbert.ch President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUGhttp://SIUG.ch Working on establishing a non-corrupt and truly /open/ international standards organization http://OpenISO.org ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
