Re: A priori IPR choices

[Brian E Carpenter]

(Cross posting removed)

On 2007-10-24 22:56, Philippe Verdy wrote:

...

However, the FSF recognizes that, until now, the IETF was more strict about
the licensing conditions, rejecting proposals that included royalties-maker
licenses and explicit personal agreement between the licensor and the
licensees (under this scheme, if it was accepted, nothing would prevent a
licensor to start charging yearly royalties to each licensor for exercising
the patented rights.


In that case the FSF recognized wrong... the IETF has often approved standards
track documents with IPR disclosures setting RAND conditions.

On 2007-10-26 21:13, Norbert Bollow wrote:

...

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!


Norbert, you seem to miss the point that the IETF's criterion
for advancing documents along the standards track is *empirical*
(has interoperability been demonstrated in the real world?) and
emphatically not faith-based (do we *believe* that the standard is
good and the IPR issues unimportant?). The question at issue is
whether we should change the empirical criteria to explicitly include
the availability of at least one implementation that is both
interoperable and free.

On 2007-10-27 07:22, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
...

It is not a major change in principle. But it does have some practical changes.

When we chartered KEYPROV I was told that the IPR regime should not be in the 
charter, this was not a concern to me there because all the proposals were OK 
IPR wise. But I do want to have the option of the forcing function in the 
charter as explained. This is standard in OASIS and in W3C there is only one 
regime that the WGs can chose.


I think it really is an enormous change in principle, from
an empirical to a faith-based approach.

On 2007-10-27 08:06, SM wrote:
...
Patents do raise some concerns about interoperability in regards to open source/free software.  From a technical point of view, there is nothing that prevents implementation if the specifications are available.  But then, we are taking a narrowed view of interoperability. 


Well, that's exactly the reason for the IETF's empirical approach;
we don't even need to consider IPR as a separate issue when testing
interoperability. The simple existence of interoperable implementations
tells us that IPR conditions must be reasonable. If we extend that to
include at least one free implementation, that tells us that IPR
conditions for free software must be reasonable. QED.

Brian

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[SM]

At 01:13 26-10-2007, Norbert Bollow wrote:

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?


The better question would be: Are Internet standards so unimportant 
that copyleft open source /free software developers don't participate 
in the process?


Letter-writing campaigns may not be the best way to influence the 
process (see RedPhone incident).


Patents do raise some concerns about interoperability in regards to 
open source/free software.  From a technical point of view, there is 
nothing that prevents implementation if the specifications are 
available.  But then, we are taking a narrowed view of interoperability.


Regards,
-sm 



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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

It is not a major change in principle. But it does have some practical changes.

When we chartered KEYPROV I was told that the IPR regime should not be in the 
charter, this was not a concern to me there because all the proposals were OK 
IPR wise. But I do want to have the option of the forcing function in the 
charter as explained. This is standard in OASIS and in W3C there is only one 
regime that the WGs can chose.

I do not expect there to be very many charter changes of that type if any. And 
if it was going to happen I would expect that it would have already soaked up a 
large amount of IESG time.

The point about making the statement in the charter is that if people are going 
to commit time and resources they have a right to understand upfront what the 
IPR is going to be and for this to only change if there are exceptional 
circumstances. When we were doing S/MIME and SSL we all knew about the RSA 
patent going in. There were no suprises.

A WG has to recharter to add stuff to the charter, changing the IPR regime is a 
much more serious change in my view.


In MARID it was obvious from the start that there was no prospect of an 
encumbered technology being adopted. Everyone recognized the fact. The WG came 
off the rails because there was not agreement on what the criteria for being 
unencumbered were.

Another change I am looking for is for the default assumption going forward to 
be that the IETF will manage all the mailing lists for WGs and BOFs and that 
these will be automatically archived and contain prominent NOTE WELL 
notification in their subscription process.

A final change I would like to see is less scope for thrashing on this topic on 
this list :-)
 

> -Original Message-
> From: Spencer Dawkins [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 12:12 PM
> To: ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices
> 
> Hi, Phil,
> 
> I'm not seeing anything in your proposal that requires 
> changes to the IPR procedures in IETF - are you?
> 
> I AM seeing something in your proposal that could reasonably 
> be adopted by specific working groups, and I AM seeing 
> something that might reasonably be developed into an 
> Informational RFC(*) (heck, maybe even an ION) saying "some 
> IETF participants worry about X, so we're explicitly pointing 
> out that IETF working groups can do Y to reduce the chances 
> of X happening, and here's how to do Y".
> 
> If there's any gap between the tools we have and what you're 
> suggesting, it's your wish to have this constraint IN THE 
> WORKING GROUP CHARTER. Is that critical? and if so, is there 
> any OTHER way to obtain WG consensus and document it, so the 
> WG doesn't have to keep defending the choice?
> 
> I AM thinking that including IPR constraints in the charter 
> would set off IESG review for charter changes if the WG 
> changes its mind - I'm not sure that's helpful, and it's 
> certainly not required today.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Spencer
> 
> (*) The IPR working group has developed Informational RFCs 
> offered as guidance in the past - I'm sure Phil knows about 
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3669.txt, but others may not have 
> noticed it.
> 
> From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Theodore Tso" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Norbert Bollow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 9:51 AM
> Subject: RE: A priori IPR choices
> 
> The reason I would like to be able to put a RANDZ requirement 
> in a WG charter is that there are certain areas where I would 
> like to see a working group form, where there is a set of 
> clearly unencumbered technology that can be used and 
> alternative technology that is owned by a proprietary concern.
> 
> I want a WG to be able to make it clear to such rights 
> holders from the outset that their technology is going to be 
> stripped from the documents if they fail to deliver 
> acceptable access terms before the start of last call. 
> 
> 
> 
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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Scott Brim]

On 24 Oct 2007 at 11:01 -0700, Hallam-Baker, Phillip allegedly wrote:
> What I would like to do here is to arrive at a set of terms that is
> considered to be sufficiently RANDZ

NO license required is better than RANDZ.  


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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Philippe Verdy]

 requested to
all licensees in the future by the patent owner.

With all these conditions, patents are in fact not needed. We much prefer
the system of copyrights which is much simpler to protect open and free
technologies.

 

If needed, all RFCs published by the IETF should first pass a long enough
transitory period where the RFC is published but with strong notice that it
is not approved, so that the only rile of the publication is to verify that
the RFC does not violate any rights. After this time has elapsed (2-3 years
after first publication?) during which the other patent owners have had the
possibility to exercise their rights, the RFC could be only be in an
informational state, becoming a recommendation later.

*   The IETF should also make some efforts to propose alternatives to
every published standard, so that at least one replacement technology is
also published with the same status, allowing applications to implement
several of them, and possibly turning down rapidly, with less efforts, any
technology for which a patent becomes applicable. The BCP standard track
should list the alternative technologies, and not promote only one.
*   In addition all standard should support optional additions and a
framework for making these options interoperable with other implementations
of the standard that don’t have this option. This will ease the replacement
of one technology by another if there is any problem with a technologies
that was informally considered ”the best” one (but appears to be now
encumbered by costly patent claims). In fact this should be the role of
standards: not promoting a single technology, but providing this free
framework for interoperability. The “requirements” in a standard should be
only about interoperability, not about an exclusive implementation solution.
*   So supporting the extensibility should be a requirement for
conformance. If a “standard” does not support extensibility, it should be
deprecated or another newer standard should be created rapidly as an
accepted alternative, within which the currently deprecated standard would
just become a particular implementation.

 

  _  

De : Lawrence Rosen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Envoyé : mercredi 24 octobre 2007 04:51
À : ietf@ietf.org
Cc : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Objet : Re: A priori IPR choices

 

To: IETF list

 

These are statements from FSF about the issue we've been discussing at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 

 

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/software-patents/draft-housley-tls-authz-extns.
html 

 

and

 

http://www.fsf.org/news/oppose-tls-authz-standard.html 

 

The GPL does not have problems with most IETF specifications, only those
that are encumbered by non-free patents. This is an important example of why
so many of us in the open source and free software communities believe that
the IETF patent policy must be improved. 

 

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Spencer Dawkins]

Hi, Phil,

I'm not seeing anything in your proposal that requires changes to the IPR 
procedures in IETF - are you?


I AM seeing something in your proposal that could reasonably be adopted by 
specific working groups, and I AM seeing something that might reasonably be 
developed into an Informational RFC(*) (heck, maybe even an ION) saying 
"some IETF participants worry about X, so we're explicitly pointing out that 
IETF working groups can do Y to reduce the chances of X happening, and 
here's how to do Y".


If there's any gap between the tools we have and what you're suggesting, 
it's your wish to have this constraint IN THE WORKING GROUP CHARTER. Is that 
critical? and if so, is there any OTHER way to obtain WG consensus and 
document it, so the WG doesn't have to keep defending the choice?


I AM thinking that including IPR constraints in the charter would set off 
IESG review for charter changes if the WG changes its mind - I'm not sure 
that's helpful, and it's certainly not required today.


Thanks,

Spencer

(*) The IPR working group has developed Informational RFCs offered as 
guidance in the past - I'm sure Phil knows about 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3669.txt, but others may not have noticed it.


From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Theodore Tso" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Norbert Bollow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: 
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 9:51 AM
Subject: RE: A priori IPR choices

The reason I would like to be able to put a RANDZ requirement in a WG 
charter is that there are certain areas where I would like to see a working 
group form, where there is a set of clearly unencumbered technology that can 
be used and alternative technology that is owned by a proprietary concern.


I want a WG to be able to make it clear to such rights holders from the 
outset that their technology is going to be stripped from the documents if 
they fail to deliver acceptable access terms before the start of last call. 




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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

I do not believe in a blanket policy, nor am I proposing one. 

What I want to do is to establish an effective constraint against Patent 
Weasels. A Patent Weasel is not the same as a Patent Troll. A Troll waits till 
you have built the bridge and then tells you that he wants a toll.

A Weasel helps you to build the bridge by promising that they will give you an 
open license but is deliberately vague as to what the actual terms of the 
license will be. It is always something that will be postponed into the future 
and meanwhile you continue to build the bridge.

This is of course what some people are concerned that F500 patent powerhouses 
might do, or at least what some people will say is their concern. I am not 
really worried about that, a large company with a real business is always much 
more concerned about their brand and their reputation and their ongoing 
business.


The real concern in my view is two-fold. First there is the OpenMarket problem, 
a company files a patent with a ridiculous claim in it, goes bust and gets 
bought out. Second there is the patent weasel who is really planning to become 
a troll. 

The reason I would like to be able to put a RANDZ requirement in a WG charter 
is that there are certain areas where I would like to see a working group form, 
where there is a set of clearly unencumbered technology that can be used and 
alternative technology that is owned by a proprietary concern. 

I want a WG to be able to make it clear to such rights holders from the outset 
that their technology is going to be stripped from the documents if they fail 
to deliver acceptable access terms before the start of last call.


For example, say were were going to develop an audio compression standard (I 
choose this because its something we are not going to do and thus clearly an 
example). The starting point candidates might be AC3, AAC, OGG-Vorbis, MP3, 
TROLL, SPLUNGE, etc.

Now there are many ways to compress audio and many ways to evaluate the value 
of the result. Newer algorithms require less bandwidth, better quality, 
whatever. But from my point of view I simply don't care. If the SPLUNGE CODEC 
is acceptably compact and offers acceptable quality and is out of patent (and 
thus definitively open) I simply do not care how compact or efficient the 
proprietary contenders might be.

Having chosen the SPLUNGE codec and thus guaranteed a level of basic 
interoperability the value of the patents on the alternatives has been 
diminished considerably. If the mandated codec in APP is TROLL, the owner of 
the TROLL patents can charge an amount proportional to the value of APP. If the 
mandated codec is SPLUNGE the owner of the TROLL patent can only charge for the 
marginal increase in value it provides, (APP(TROLL) - APP(SPLUNGE)).

So when starting the CODEC WG it makes good sense to require RANDZ upfront, in 
fact identifying an unencumbered CODEC might well be the entire point of the 
exercise.


Clearly if we are going to develop a standard for Content Rights Management or 
the like it is pretty unlikely that a group could succeed if its charter 
mandated RANDZ (although this might change as the patents expire).

> -Original Message-
> From: Theodore Tso [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 4:22 PM
> To: Norbert Bollow
> Cc: ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices
> 
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 07:09:54PM +0200, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> I was thinking mainly about protocols used by application 
> programs.  I agree that something essential needed for IPv6, 
> that might be something that an individual wg might want to 
> consider.  But in terms of a blanket policy that would apply 
> to *ALL* IETF protocols?  That would something that is really 
> NOT an IETF-wide concern.
> 
>   - Ted
> 
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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Norbert Bollow]

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

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2007-10-26 06:09, Norbert Bollow wrote:

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.


To be blunter than Ted, this is a problem that the GPL community
has to solve, not the IETF. I don't mean the IETF shouldn't
consider it as one factor among many when evaluating a technology
choice, but the underlying issue is between the GPL and the patent
regime. Our test has always been "has interoperability been
demonstrated in the real world?" and that remains a pretty strong
test.

Brian

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Theodore Tso]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 07:09:54PM +0200, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> > 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.

I was thinking mainly about protocols used by application programs.  I
agree that something essential needed for IPv6, that might be
something that an individual wg might want to consider.  But in terms
of a blanket policy that would apply to *ALL* IETF protocols?  That
would something that is really NOT an IETF-wide concern.

- Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[David Morris]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, 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.

Well, by the time the world is ready for IPv6 I expect that patent would
have expired ;-:)

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Norbert Bollow]

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.


-- 
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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

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Theodore Tso]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 06:00:42PM +0200, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> > 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.

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.

- Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Ted Hardie]

At 11:04 AM +0200 10/25/07, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>Ted Hardie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>>>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?
>
>GNU Zebra, Quagga, and MPLS-linux are three projects that come up by
>searching for relevant technology.

I'm actually fairly familiar with Quagga, having used it in route-server
mode, and it's mind understanding that it and Zebra don't really
match the control  plane uses of CCAMP.  I'm not familiar with
MPLS-linux, but I'll take a  look at it; thanks for the pointer.



>I think you are missing the point, though.  The point is to make sure
>that a free software implementation of IETF technology is _possible_.
>That doesn't necessarily mean that you won't be able to find an IETF WG
>with technical work that may not have been implemented already in free
>software.

The point I'm making, though, is that there really are different development
communities working in the IETF.  The GMPLS work in CCAMP is control
plane work  for wavelength, TDMA, and spatial switching networks.  Though 
clearly
important to keeping many networks running, it doesn't have the same
reach of development interest as many of the other technologies in the
IETF.  If  you were to compare it to the development communities involved
in apps groups like CALSIFY or LEMONADE, you would find a very small
overlap.   Those development communities may well have different priorities
in evaluating a license; some may find it problematic to include something
that is royalty bearing or requires a reciprocal agreement and some may not.

Privileging a development community which might someday arise and
whose work might someday get deployment over the folks actually already
spending time and effort on developing and deploying a standard
is an odd position.  Our aim is to make the Internet work, not to advance
one kind of license over another.  If the Internet will work better using a 
technology
that requires a license incompatible with the GPL or even BSD licenses, then
we should let the folks working in that area make that decision.   

In other words, this is about engineering trade-offs, not ideology.

regards,
Ted






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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Norbert Bollow]

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.


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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday 25 October 2007 11:33, Theodore Tso 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.)
>
> Of course there can be are problems when the reference implementation
> doesn't quite jibe with the formal printed specification, but that is
> true regardless how the reference implementation is licensed.
>
The context wasn't reference implementations, but deployment in the real world 
where interoperability among different implementations (some with GPL 
licensing) is desired.

Scott K

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Theodore Tso]

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.)

Of course there can be are problems when the reference implementation
doesn't quite jibe with the formal printed specification, but that is
true regardless how the reference implementation is licensed.

 - Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Simon Josefsson]

Ted Hardie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>>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?

GNU Zebra, Quagga, and MPLS-linux are three projects that come up by
searching for relevant technology.

I think you are missing the point, though.  The point is to make sure
that a free software implementation of IETF technology is _possible_.
That doesn't necessarily mean that you won't be able to find an IETF WG
with technical work that may not have been implemented already in free
software.

/Simon

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2007-10-25 08:32, Ted Hardie wrote:

At 10:02 AM -0700 10/24/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote:

Ted Hardie wrote:

The point being, of course, that there is a world of difference between
"many" and "all" here.  If there is no development community using
the GPL in an area, forcing the IPR restrictions to meet a GPL test
may hinder development rather than enhance it, especially in
cases where the only requirement in a license is to request it.
For many development communities, that is not an issue since it
requires no monetary outlay.

Will you please stop talking about GPL as if it is the only open source
license relevant here!


Sorry, but the context in this part of the thread was specific to the GPL.
To refresh your memory on the bits the Brian, Norbert, and Scott
put forward that set that context:


Norbert wrote:
How about: 'Should be possible to implement without having to ask for
permission or pay a fee'?

Brian replied:
That will never fly. For good reason, many patent holders insist
on reciprocity conditions, and that seems to require an explicit
request and acknowledgement.

Scott add:
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.


My concern is that *all* free and open source
licensors be able to implement IETF specifications without patent
encumbrances. And *all* proprietary licensors too, for that matter. There
ought to be no "GPL test" for IETF specifications, other than that our
specifications be implementable and distributable under the GPL *and any
other* license.


The world as it is now simply does include licenses that aren't compatible.
As Brian pointed out, reciprocity conditions are common, as are requests
to acknowledge.  If Scott is right and these won't work with the
GPL, working groups will have choices to make about the
implementation and deployment communities' needs.  This is why we
keep pushing the decision into the working groups, rather than making
a priori IPR choices:  it's the place most likely to know whether a
reciprocal license/royalty-bearing license/piece of GPL'ed code in the standards
document is actually likely to cause a problem.
regards,
Ted


I think this completes the thread of argument. As long as some
open source licenses contain language that asserts that the code
is not encumbered by additional patent licensing requirements,
*and* there is no change in the legal and economic reasons for
companies to insist on reciprocity and acknowledgement even for
RF licenses, we (the IETF) simply cannot find a better compromise
than deciding case by case.

I do like Sam's suggestion of giving the availability of free
software weight in the Proposed Standard decision, but that
is not a discontinuity in IETF practice.

  Brian

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Norbert Bollow]

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.


-- 
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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

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Norbert Bollow]

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

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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Ted Hardie]

At 10:02 AM -0700 10/24/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
>Ted Hardie wrote:
>> The point being, of course, that there is a world of difference between
>> "many" and "all" here.  If there is no development community using
>> the GPL in an area, forcing the IPR restrictions to meet a GPL test
>> may hinder development rather than enhance it, especially in
>> cases where the only requirement in a license is to request it.
>> For many development communities, that is not an issue since it
>> requires no monetary outlay.
>
>Will you please stop talking about GPL as if it is the only open source
>license relevant here!

Sorry, but the context in this part of the thread was specific to the GPL.
To refresh your memory on the bits the Brian, Norbert, and Scott
put forward that set that context:

> >>Norbert wrote:
> >> How about: 'Should be possible to implement without having to ask for
> >> permission or pay a fee'?
> >Brian replied:
> >That will never fly. For good reason, many patent holders insist
> >on reciprocity conditions, and that seems to require an explicit
> >request and acknowledgement.
>Scott add:
>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.

>My concern is that *all* free and open source
>licensors be able to implement IETF specifications without patent
>encumbrances. And *all* proprietary licensors too, for that matter. There
>ought to be no "GPL test" for IETF specifications, other than that our
>specifications be implementable and distributable under the GPL *and any
>other* license.

The world as it is now simply does include licenses that aren't compatible.
As Brian pointed out, reciprocity conditions are common, as are requests
to acknowledge.  If Scott is right and these won't work with the
GPL, working groups will have choices to make about the
implementation and deployment communities' needs.  This is why we
keep pushing the decision into the working groups, rather than making
a priori IPR choices:  it's the place most likely to know whether a
reciprocal license/royalty-bearing license/piece of GPL'ed code in the standards
document is actually likely to cause a problem.
regards,
Ted

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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

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.



From: Tony Finch on behalf of Tony Finch
Sent: Wed 24/10/2007 3:04 PM
To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Cc: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: RE: A priori IPR choices



On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

> GPL would not be a criterion I would consider reasonable. And in
> particular I would not accept the idea that the IETF or any other body
> be committed to whatever notions insert themselves into RMS in the
> future.

There are plenty of much less rabid open source licences which have
similar approaches to patents as the GPL: see the Apache licence version
2 or the Mozilla Public Licence version 1.1, both of which include
non-bureaucratic patent licensing and anti-litigation clauses.

Tony.
--
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MODERATE OR GOOD.


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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday 24 October 2007 14:01, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> GPL would not be a criterion I would consider reasonable. And in particular
> I would not accept the idea that the IETF or any other body be committed to
> whatever notions insert themselves into RMS in the future. I have actually
> met RMS.
>
> What I would like to do here is to arrive at a set of terms that is
> considered to be sufficiently RANDZ to be sufficiently compatible with the
> consensus amongst open source developers. At the moment I do not see a
> consensus in favor of GPL 3.0.
>
> Having seen a WG crash and burn after theological discussions over open
> source license compatibility I would like to see an IETF level consensus
> that terms X are sufficiently open for most purposes. If someone had a
> reason to beleive that these were not sufficient in a specific working
> group for specific reasons these could then be argued in the WG if there
> was a WG consensus that this was necessary.

I'd say it entirely depends.  I can understand not wanting to hitch your wagon 
to any particular individual's view of the future of licensing.  OTOH, where 
GPL software represents a significant fragment of the internet landscape, you 
have to (I think) accept GPL compatible licensing terms or give up on 
interoperability.  BTW, I think Yahoo!'s revised DomainKeys license solves 
this is a useful way that may have more general utility.

Scott K

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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Tony Finch]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

> GPL would not be a criterion I would consider reasonable. And in
> particular I would not accept the idea that the IETF or any other body
> be committed to whatever notions insert themselves into RMS in the
> future.

There are plenty of much less rabid open source licences which have
similar approaches to patents as the GPL: see the Apache licence version
2 or the Mozilla Public Licence version 1.1, both of which include
non-bureaucratic patent licensing and anti-litigation clauses.

Tony.
-- 
f.a.n.finch  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  http://dotat.at/
LUNDY FASTNET IRISH SEA: EAST OR SOUTHEAST 3 OR 4. SLIGHT OR MODERATE. FAIR.
MODERATE OR GOOD.

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RE: FYI 28 (was: A priori IPR choices)

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

Not as out of date as some sources
 
http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/
 
It was my first computer book.



From: Frank Ellermann [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wed 24/10/2007 7:58 AM
To: ietf@ietf.org
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: FYI 28 (was: A priori IPR choices)



Philippe Verdy wrote:

> We do have lots of informational RFCs which are still needed and
> actively used, sometimes even required (notably those in the BCP
> series, like the "Netiquette" which has become a requirement for
> almost all ISP customers, as part of their contract, despite they
> are only informational, and could change at any time after having
> been replaced by another RFC replacing the older one with the same
> BCP number.

BCPs aren't informational RFCs, for an introduction see RFC 4677
or <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments#Status>.
Maybe you confused BCP with FYI, RFC 1855 is also known as FYI 28.

FLAME ON: It's now 12 years old, and some parts are rather silly:
Be careful with monospacing fonts, and be sure to have a signature
which you attach to your message.
FLAME OFF (flame tags recommended by FYI 28).

 Frank


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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

GPL would not be a criterion I would consider reasonable. And in particular I 
would not accept the idea that the IETF or any other body be committed to 
whatever notions insert themselves into RMS in the future. I have actually met 
RMS.
 
What I would like to do here is to arrive at a set of terms that is considered 
to be sufficiently RANDZ to be sufficiently compatible with the consensus 
amongst open source developers. At the moment I do not see a consensus in favor 
of GPL 3.0. 
 
Having seen a WG crash and burn after theological discussions over open source 
license compatibility I would like to see an IETF level consensus that terms X 
are sufficiently open for most purposes. If someone had a reason to beleive 
that these were not sufficient in a specific working group for specific reasons 
these could then be argued in the WG if there was a WG consensus that this was 
necessary. 
 
Contrawise if someone were to argue that there was a case that made it 
necessary to accept RAND terms with a paid license this would also be an option 
but one that I would expect to be the rare exception which is the reason I 
started my example 'absent a compelling technical case'.
 
 
Most of the IPR that becomes troublesome was originally filed as defensive. I 
am going to be filing a lot more patent applications in the future, the main 
business case for doing so being to reduce (not eliminate) patent liability 
exposure. I would like to have the licensing criteria established at the time 
we make the application, not three times (on application, on starting work in 
WG, on finalizing work in WG) with possibly different lawyers.
 
 
 


From: Scott Kitterman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wed 24/10/2007 11:33 AM
To: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices



On Wednesday 24 October 2007 06:50, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> 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?
>
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.

Scott K

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RE: A priori IPR choices

[Lawrence Rosen]

Ted Hardie wrote:
> The point being, of course, that there is a world of difference between
> "many" and "all" here.  If there is no development community using
> the GPL in an area, forcing the IPR restrictions to meet a GPL test
> may hinder development rather than enhance it, especially in
> cases where the only requirement in a license is to request it.
> For many development communities, that is not an issue since it
> requires no monetary outlay.

Will you please stop talking about GPL as if it is the only open source
license relevant here! My concern is that *all* free and open source
licensors be able to implement IETF specifications without patent
encumbrances. And *all* proprietary licensors too, for that matter. There
ought to be no "GPL test" for IETF specifications, other than that our
specifications be implementable and distributable under the GPL *and any
other* license.

As for setting our IPR policy based on whether there be an actual GPL (or
other specific license) implementation at the time the specification is
being created and approved, that's a strange proposal. The freedom and
openness we seek is for implementations of IETF specifications now *or in
the future*. We may not be using GPL now, but maybe someone will want to
later. Why shouldn't IETF's IPR policy be compatible with that?

/Larry


> -Original Message-
> From: Ted Hardie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 9:17 AM
> To: Scott Kitterman; ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices
> 
> >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?
> That was one of the examples neither Sam nor I could immediately
> come up with, but I'd be interested in hearing if it is just too far off
> my
> stomping grounds.
> 
> The point being, of course, that there is a world of difference between
> "many" and "all" here.  If there is no development community using
> the GPL in an area, forcing the IPR restrictions to meet a GPL test
> may hinder development rather than enhance it, especially in
> cases where the only requirement in a license is to request it.
> For many development communities, that is not an issue since it
> requires no monetary outlay.
> 
> Speaking only for myself,
>   regards,
>   Ted
> 
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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Ted Hardie]

At 8:10 PM -0400 10/23/07, Theodore Tso wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 01:04:32PM -0700, Ted Hardie wrote:
>> I believe it is fairer to recognize that in your example proposal B
>> is known to have been patented where A is not.  There is always the
>> chance that someone will turn out to have secured rights which they
>> later claim read on A.  In that case it may actually be better to
>> choose B, knowing that the license offered works for the development
>> and deployment community than to choose A.  In other words, a
>> "defensive" patent declaration by someone whose license works for
>> the appropriate community may actually add security.  It doesn't
>> completely remove the risk that someone will turn up with other
>> rights, but it really can help.
>
>This doesn't follow.  Just because a company has patents that read on
>B doesn't guarantee some other company *also* has patents that read on
>B.  So you can't say with certainty choosing path B is better than
>path A just because a company has already declared they have patents
>that read on B.

Yes, this was the case I was thinking of when I said it does not fully
remove the risk.  What it can give you, though, is a company whose
interests in the patent they have been granted may cause them
to challenge later patents which read on the same technology.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe it can also go to the "willful
infringement" test.  If you have a license from company A that
covers a technology and B and C are also granted patents to
the same technology (your compression algorithm case), then
I find it hard to believe that you could be found willful in your
infringements of B and C's patents.  As I said, though, I'm not
a lawyer and I'd ask one before I made that statement to
a working group facing the problem. 

>The US Patent Office may have simply issued two patents on the
>identical technology (I believe the cannonical example is the case
>where three patents were issued covering the same compression
>algorithm).  Or there may have been other aspects of B that happened
>to be patented by another company, and if it is currently owned by a
>Patent Troll who has no interest in participating in the IETF process,
>there is no way for the working group to know about the Patent Troll's
>patents.

I don't think we even have to get to "patent troll" before we find this
problem.  There are lots of folks involved in developing technology
who do not participate in the IETF.  If a sound engineering company
develops a compression algorithm that turns out to be really useful
in compressing byte streams, it might get used by a WG without
recognition that the patent exists.  When the coverage is later
discovered, the industry has to deal with it. 

regards,
Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Ted Hardie]

>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?
That was one of the examples neither Sam nor I could immediately
come up with, but I'd be interested in hearing if it is just too far off my
stomping grounds.

The point being, of course, that there is a world of difference between
"many" and "all" here.  If there is no development community using
the GPL in an area, forcing the IPR restrictions to meet a GPL test
may hinder development rather than enhance it, especially in
cases where the only requirement in a license is to request it.
For many development communities, that is not an issue since it
requires no monetary outlay.

Speaking only for myself,
regards,
Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday 24 October 2007 06:50, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> 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?
>
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.

Scott K

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Frank Ellermann]

Theodore Tso wrote:

 [BOCU-1] 
> Can someone give an example of someone who has requested
> a license but not received one, please?

Apparently somebody tried and got no answer, compare


> http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/ispinfo.shtml

> BOCU is not on the list of Covered Specifications

Yes, I knew this page, unfortunately BOCU wasn't listed.

 Frank


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FYI 28 (was: A priori IPR choices)

[Frank Ellermann]

Philippe Verdy wrote:

> We do have lots of informational RFCs which are still needed and
> actively used, sometimes even required (notably those in the BCP
> series, like the "Netiquette" which has become a requirement for
> almost all ISP customers, as part of their contract, despite they
> are only informational, and could change at any time after having
> been replaced by another RFC replacing the older one with the same
> BCP number.

BCPs aren't informational RFCs, for an introduction see RFC 4677
or .
Maybe you confused BCP with FYI, RFC 1855 is also known as FYI 28.

FLAME ON: It's now 12 years old, and some parts are rather silly:
Be careful with monospacing fonts, and be sure to have a signature
which you attach to your message.
FLAME OFF (flame tags recommended by FYI 28).

 Frank


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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Norbert Bollow]

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

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Theodore Tso]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 01:04:32PM -0700, Ted Hardie wrote:
> I believe it is fairer to recognize that in your example proposal B
> is known to have been patented where A is not.  There is always the
> chance that someone will turn out to have secured rights which they
> later claim read on A.  In that case it may actually be better to
> choose B, knowing that the license offered works for the development
> and deployment community than to choose A.  In other words, a
> "defensive" patent declaration by someone whose license works for
> the appropriate community may actually add security.  It doesn't
> completely remove the risk that someone will turn up with other
> rights, but it really can help.

This doesn't follow.  Just because a company has patents that read on
B doesn't guarantee some other company *also* has patents that read on
B.  So you can't say with certainty choosing path B is better than
path A just because a company has already declared they have patents
that read on B.

The US Patent Office may have simply issued two patents on the
identical technology (I believe the cannonical example is the case
where three patents were issued covering the same compression
algorithm).  Or there may have been other aspects of B that happened
to be patented by another company, and if it is currently owned by a
Patent Troll who has no interest in participating in the IETF process,
there is no way for the working group to know about the Patent Troll's
patents.

Aren't patents fun?  :-)

- Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Lawrence Rosen]

To: IETF list

 

These are statements from FSF about the issue we've been discussing at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 

 

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/software-patents/draft-housley-tls-authz-extns.
html 

 

and

 

http://www.fsf.org/news/oppose-tls-authz-standard.html 

 

The GPL does not have problems with most IETF specifications, only those
that are encumbered by non-free patents. This is an important example of why
so many of us in the open source and free software communities believe that
the IETF patent policy must be improved. 

 

/Larry Rosen

 

Lawrence Rosen

Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)

3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482

707-485-1242 * cell: 707-478-8932 * fax: 707-485-1243

Skype: LawrenceRosen

Author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and 

Intellectual Property Law" (Prentice Hall 2004)

 

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:34:45 +1300 Brian E Carpenter 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On 2007-10-24 00:20, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> Norbert Bollow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>...
>>> 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.
>> 
>> I think that is a good recommendation, and I support it.
>> 
>> I would even consider a requirement that in order to move beyond
>> Proposed Standard, a protocol needs to have a free implementation
>> available.
>
>There are two *very* different suggestions above.
>
>Norbert specifically suggests GPL compatibility as a requirement.
>That is a very stringent requirement, because of the way the GPL
>is written. Simon suggests the existence of a free implementation
>as part of the IETF's implementation interop requirements; depending
>on the definition of "free", that is a much milder requirement.
>
>In fact it seems like a quite natural extension of the rule
>established in RFC 2026 section 4.1.2, first paragraph:
>"If patented or otherwise controlled technology
>  is required for implementation, the separate implementations must
>  also have resulted from separate exercise of the licensing process."
>
>On 2007-10-24 08:06, Sam Hartman wrote:
>
>> Let me suggest starting with a lesser goal.  Try to build a consensus
>> that unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, it needs to be
>> possible to write an open-source implementation of a standard and that
>> the absence of such an implementation should be considered a red flag
>> when advancing beyond proposed.
>
>s/red flag/yellow flag/ perhaps, but I agree this is a very reasonable
>goal, and as far as I can see, essentially consistent with RFC 2026
>as quoted above.
>
>On 2007-10-24 02:58, Norbert Bollow wrote:
>...
>> 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'?
>
>That will never fly. For good reason, many patent holders insist
>on reciprocity conditions, and that seems to require an explicit
>request and acknowledgement.

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.

>On 2007-10-24 07:57, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
>
>> If we get two RANDZ proposals and one thats only RAND we don't 
>> need to talk about the third one unless the IPR changes.
>
>I think we do, if the third one is clearly technically superior.
>Why is the cost of a patent automatically more important than
>*any* engineering cost or benefit?

It's not the cost, but the incurred limit on interoperability.  

Scott K

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2007-10-24 00:20, Simon Josefsson wrote:

Norbert Bollow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

...

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.


I think that is a good recommendation, and I support it.

I would even consider a requirement that in order to move beyond
Proposed Standard, a protocol needs to have a free implementation
available.


There are two *very* different suggestions above.

Norbert specifically suggests GPL compatibility as a requirement.
That is a very stringent requirement, because of the way the GPL
is written. Simon suggests the existence of a free implementation
as part of the IETF's implementation interop requirements; depending
on the definition of "free", that is a much milder requirement.

In fact it seems like a quite natural extension of the rule
established in RFC 2026 section 4.1.2, first paragraph:
"If patented or otherwise controlled technology
 is required for implementation, the separate implementations must
 also have resulted from separate exercise of the licensing process."

On 2007-10-24 08:06, Sam Hartman wrote:


Let me suggest starting with a lesser goal.  Try to build a consensus
that unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, it needs to be
possible to write an open-source implementation of a standard and that
the absence of such an implementation should be considered a red flag
when advancing beyond proposed.


s/red flag/yellow flag/ perhaps, but I agree this is a very reasonable
goal, and as far as I can see, essentially consistent with RFC 2026
as quoted above.

On 2007-10-24 02:58, Norbert Bollow wrote:
...

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'?


That will never fly. For good reason, many patent holders insist
on reciprocity conditions, and that seems to require an explicit
request and acknowledgement.

On 2007-10-24 07:57, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

If we get two RANDZ proposals and one thats only RAND we don't 
need to talk about the third one unless the IPR changes.


I think we do, if the third one is clearly technically superior.
Why is the cost of a patent automatically more important than
*any* engineering cost or benefit?

Brian


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Sam Hartman]

> "Hallam-Baker," == Hallam-Baker, Phillip <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Hallam-Baker,> The two types of wiggle room that experience has
Hallam-Baker,> taught me to be highly undesirable are:
 
Hallam-Baker,> 1) Wiggle room of the form 'our terms are as good
Hallam-Baker,> as RANDZ' when what is being offered is going to
Hallam-Baker,> require licensing for significant classes of
Hallam-Baker,> implementation, for example:
 
Hallam-Baker,>A Terms that preclude commercial implementation
Hallam-Baker,> B Terms that effectively preclude open source C
Hallam-Baker,> Terms that preclude particular types of open source
Hallam-Baker,> license D Terms that allow certain uses but allow
Hallam-Baker,> the IPR holder to reserve certain key use types
Hallam-Baker,> such as providing essential services.
 
Hallam-Baker,> 2) Wiggle room of the type 'customary RANDZ terms
Hallam-Baker,> are not acceptable from you because'
 
Hallam-Baker,>A We don't like your company and want to make
Hallam-Baker,> life difficult for you B We have discovered a
Hallam-Baker,> theological objection to the customary terms C We
Hallam-Baker,> lost a debate in another forum and would like to
Hallam-Baker,> reopen it D We have a technical objection and will
Hallam-Baker,> use this as a veto

I agree that these types of discussions happen and are almost always bad ideas.

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Ted Hardie]

At 4:35 PM -0400 10/23/07, Sam Hartman wrote:
>
>my assumption is that our standards that are useful tend to be useful
>in open-source environments.  And that people should at least stop and
>think if there is not an OS implementation of a standard.  We might
>find a few areas (MPLS and CCAMP spring to mind) where it is quite
>clear that no such desire to implement exists even though there are
>significant other implementations. 

Interestingly, I was also thinking of CCAMP and MPLS when I was
coming up with examples.  There may well be others, though, where
the open-source implementations have a comparatively small impact on the
actual deployments even though they clearly exist; BGP, for example,
might fit into that category.  The bigger point, though, is that there are
now and likely will be in the future some technologies that are worth
IETF time and effort even if they don't appeal to the open source
community as projects (or even if the open source community projects
will have little deployment). 



>We == those interested in this idea.  I'm sorry that I failed to make
>it clear I'm speaking only for myself and especially not for the IESG.
>
>--Sam

Thank you for your clarification.  I, as well, am speaking only for myself.

regards,
Ted

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

The two types of wiggle room that experience has taught me to be highly 
undesirable are:
 
1) Wiggle room of the form 'our terms are as good as RANDZ' when what is being 
offered is going to require licensing for significant classes of 
implementation, for example:
 
   A Terms that preclude commercial implementation
   B Terms that effectively preclude open source
   C Terms that preclude particular types of open source license
   D Terms that allow certain uses but allow the IPR holder to reserve certain 
key use types such as providing essential services.
 
2) Wiggle room of the type 'customary RANDZ terms are not acceptable from you 
because'
 
   A We don't like your company and want to make life difficult for you
   B We have discovered a theological objection to the customary terms
   C We lost a debate in another forum and would like to reopen it
   D We have a technical objection and will use this as a veto
 
While it is impossible to determine what the motive of a party might be in a 
given circumstance I have heard all of these motives at least plausibly 
ascribed to one or more parties in real situations.
 
The most pernicious of these in my view is 1D. This should not be considered 
RANDZ, it is a royalty based licensing scheme where the rights holder has 
decided to maximize their revenues by applying a particular business model.
 



From: Sam Hartman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tue 23/10/2007 3:18 PM
To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Cc: Scott Brim; ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third 
LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]



Phil, I understand what you're trying to do.  I agree that more wiggle
room makes it harder.

However I think that to achieve consensus you're going to need to
allow working groups to choose to turn on the wiggle room.

I think that you could get somewhere with an opt-in proposal.  For a
particular technology or WG, the WG can opt-in to something with very
little wiggle room.  I personally don't think you can do better than
that.

However I do think you could put together some standard optinos to
opt-in to.



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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Sam Hartman]

> "Ted" == Ted Hardie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Ted> At 3:06 PM -0400 10/23/07, Sam Hartman wrote:
>>  Let me suggest starting with a lesser goal.  Try to build a
>> consensus that unless there is a good reason to do otherwise,
>> it needs to be possible to write an open-source implementation
>> of a standard and that the absence of such an implementation
>> should be considered a red flag when advancing beyond proposed.

Ted> I think you have to be careful here, as "open-source" covers
Ted> a variety of licenses.  Having a diverse set of
Ted> implementations is clearly a good sign that a standard's
Ted> specification is clear enough to implement and useful enough
Ted> that folks have chosen to spend the time.  Those ought to be
Ted> critical aspects of our thinking when we look at how to
Ted> revive the standards track's upper reaches.  But reviving it
Ted> will get more difficult, in my opinion, if we set tests like
Ted> "must show at least one implementation subject to the GPL",
Ted> as that presumes which implementation groups are interested,
Ted> or delays forward progress until a group that does not work
Ted> in that mode produces an example implementation that meets
Ted> the test.  Even if this is an informal requirement (lore
Ted> vs. spec.), this could discourage those working for
Ted> advancement.

my assumption is that our standards that are useful tend to be useful
in open-source environments.  And that people should at least stop and
think if there is not an OS implementation of a standard.  We might
find a few areas (MPLS and CCAMP spring to mind) where it is quite
clear that no such desire to implement exists even though there are
significant other implementations.  And that we'd want to think about
why there was no OS implementation if it happened there was none.  By
think about I mean provide some explanation for and consider whether
there is a deeper problem.


>> Basically I'd like to start by getting to a point where we
>> assume that open-source implementations are a goal and that we
>> explicitly decide that they are not a requirement in contexts
>> where that makes sense.
>> 
>> I suspect we would run into resistance building that consensus
>> but it might be worth trying.

Ted> I'm a little confused as to the antecedent of "we" in the
Ted> statement above.  I assume you mean you and Simon, but that
Ted> you are basically speaking for yourself.  If you mean "we" in
Ted> some other sense (especially if you mean it to include the
Ted> IESG, which some might infer from your role), it is not
Ted> clear.


We == those interested in this idea.  I'm sorry that I failed to make
it clear I'm speaking only for myself and especially not for the IESG.

--Sam


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Ted Hardie]

At 3:06 PM -0400 10/23/07, Sam Hartman wrote:
>
>Let me suggest starting with a lesser goal.  Try to build a consensus
>that unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, it needs to be
>possible to write an open-source implementation of a standard and that
>the absence of such an implementation should be considered a red flag
>when advancing beyond proposed.

I think you have to be careful here, as "open-source" covers a variety
of licenses.  Having a diverse set of implementations is clearly
a good sign that a standard's specification is clear enough to implement
and useful enough that folks have chosen to spend the time.  Those
ought to be critical aspects of our thinking when we look at how
to revive the standards track's upper reaches.  But reviving it
will get more difficult, in my opinion, if we set tests like "must
show at least one implementation subject to the GPL", as that
presumes which implementation groups are interested,
or delays forward progress until a group that does not work
in that mode produces an example implementation that meets
the test.  Even if this is an informal requirement (lore vs. spec.),
this could discourage those working for advancement.

>Basically I'd like to start by getting to a point where we assume that
>open-source implementations are a goal and that we explicitly decide
>that they are not a requirement in contexts where that makes sense.
>
>I suspect we would run into resistance building that consensus but it
>might be worth trying.

I'm a little confused as to the antecedent of "we" in the statement above.
I assume you mean you and Simon, but that you are basically speaking for
yourself.  If you mean "we" in some other sense (especially if you mean it to
include the IESG, which some might infer from your role), it is not clear.

Speaking only for myself,
Ted

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Ted Hardie]

At 11:57 AM -0700 10/23/07, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
>Content-class: urn:content-classes:message
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
>   boundary="_=_NextPart_001_01C815A6.947239F7"
>
>The objective here is to constrain the amount of unproductive argument by 
>limiting the number of possible end states.
> 
>In particular I would like to tip the scales so that if we have proposals A 
>and B where A is unemcumbered but B is not that proposal B has to demonstrate 
>a remarkably higher value in order to be chosen over A.
> 

I believe it is fairer to recognize that in your example proposal B is known to 
have
been patented where A is not.  There is always the chance that someone will 
turn out to
have secured rights which they later claim read on A.   In that case it may 
actually
be better to choose B, knowing that the license offered works for the 
development
and deployment community than to choose A.  In other words, a "defensive"
patent declaration by someone whose license works for the appropriate
community may actually add security.  It doesn't completely remove the risk
that someone will turn up with other rights, but it really can help.

The reason that the "wiggle room" argument is problematic is that the
development and deployment communities for different areas of standards
work in the IETF are different.  A license offered by company C for work
in routing may work well, where the exact same license by organization M
for work at the apps layer may not.  Allowing the folks who actually plan
to write the code to indicate where there are problems and where not
may be better than trying to get a few sizes to fit all.

Several people have already sent pointers to Simon's draft, which describes
how to get to a particular outcome; I think that is a good thrust.  With that
and similar documents in hand, that community can have blueprints for
how to achieve particular goals.  Those will get used, and that will make things
easier. 

But that's very different from trying to set the scales for working groups
in advance.  That will just get into hair-splitting over whether something
meets a vague test for "remarkably higher", which is even harder to
get argued.  "I can and will implement this, with the offered license" is a
much easier statement to evaluate than "This meets the 3 tests offered
in RFC  for "remarkably higher" value because of N, M, and O".

Speaking only for my non-lawyer self,
Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Sam Hartman]

Phil, I understand what you're trying to do.  I agree that more wiggle
room makes it harder.

However I think that to achieve consensus you're going to need to
allow working groups to choose to turn on the wiggle room.

I think that you could get somewhere with an opt-in proposal.  For a
particular technology or WG, the WG can opt-in to something with very
little wiggle room.  I personally don't think you can do better than
that.

However I do think you could put together some standard optinos to
opt-in to.


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Sam Hartman]

> "Simon" == Simon Josefsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Simon> Norbert Bollow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>>> 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.

Simon> I think that is a good recommendation, and I support it.

Simon> I would even consider a requirement that in order to move
Simon> beyond Proposed Standard, a protocol needs to have a free
Simon> implementation available.

I'd love to get there, but I think building that consensus today would
be a non-starter.

Let me suggest starting with a lesser goal.  Try to build a consensus
that unless there is a good reason to do otherwise, it needs to be
possible to write an open-source implementation of a standard and that
the absence of such an implementation should be considered a red flag
when advancing beyond proposed.

Basically I'd like to start by getting to a point where we assume that
open-source implementations are a goal and that we explicitly decide
that they are not a requirement in contexts where that makes sense.

I suspect we would run into resistance building that consensus but it
might be worth trying.
  --Sam


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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

The objective here is to constrain the amount of unproductive argument by 
limiting the number of possible end states.
 
In particular I would like to tip the scales so that if we have proposals A and 
B where A is unemcumbered but B is not that proposal B has to demonstrate a 
remarkably higher value in order to be chosen over A. 
 
Now imagine that proposal B is slightly better but not so overwhelmingly so 
that it is going to win if it continues to be encumbered. I want the engineer 
responsible to be able to go to their management with a clear value 
proposition: that the licensing fees will be $0 in either case, that in order 
to benefit from the advantages of B the IPR owner is going to have to execute 
an agreement that satisfies these specific criteria, and that these criteria 
have proved acceptable to the lawyers at major patent conscious companies such 
as [...], that this will not blunt the defensive use of the patents and that 
any other IPR holders will be required to provide access to their technology on 
terms that are at least as favorable.
 
The more wiggle room is allowed, the less likely it is that the intended result 
will be achieved. In particular the lawyer for company B is going to be looking 
to demonstrate their worth to management by demonstrating that they have 
successfully ensured that equally favorable terms will be available from othe 
companies.
 
 
Another important case is the defensive patent or patent application which is 
understood to be complete garbage by everyone including the owner  but can be 
finessed to establish a dominant position in a working group before it begins. 
The 'its my ball and I'm taking it home unless I get to bat first' gambit.
 
 
Another way to tip the scales would be to specify whether the IPR regime is 
RAND or RANDZ in the charter and allow this to be changed by rechartering.
 
We already make a limited IPR release when submitting an Internet Draft. I see 
two cases of interest:
 
1) The whole point of the proposal is to make the ideas covered by the IPR into 
a standard.
2) A proposal is made which incidentally happens to involve other IPR held by 
the submitter's company that the submitter is either not aware of or not aware 
of the connection.
 
The second is the corner case concern which motivates a lot of the big company 
objections to up front declarations. But in practice the first point is much 
more frequent.
 
If the first case holds I think the submitter should either state that this is 
a RAND proposal when they submit or get the necessary approvals to submitt as a 
proposal for RANDZ - IF ACCEPTED.
 
 
If we get two RANDZ proposals and one thats only RAND we don't need to talk 
about the third one unless the IPR changes.
 


From: Sam Hartman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tue 23/10/2007 9:07 AM
To: Scott Brim
Cc: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third 
LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]



>>>>> "Scott" == Scott Brim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Scott> On 22 Oct 2007 at 17:46 -0400, Sam Hartman allegedly wrote:
>> * Phil's proposal has been shot down prematurely in my opinion.
>> I agree that his current version would not fly.  However I do
>> think there are working groups that could make conclusions
>> about their patent policies and for which doing so would have
>> helped the effort a lot.

Scott> Working Groups have the freedom to do that if they wish.  I
Scott> don't want a simplistic edict from on high that all working
Scott> groups must do so.  Interactions between issues, technical
Scott> and otherwise, are way too varied and potentially
Scott> complicated for such shallow rule-making.

I agree that forcing working groups to make a decision at the
beginning would be bad.  I think the you must decide part of Phil's
proposal is one of the things that would have to go.  Phil may argue
that's the only value his proposal has; I disagree.

>> Working through draft-housley-tls-authz-extns gave me a
>> personal significant lack of confidence in our patent policies
>> and whether they meet our goals and objectives.  I also wonder
>> whether our goals and objectives may have shifted somewhat
>> since they were written.  However I'm definitely uncomfortable
>> with relying on our existing documents in any real dispute.

Scott> I think the problem is that because we have a wide range of
Scott> opinion and desired outcome, we cannot create simple rules,
Scott> which means the difficult cases take a lot of discussion.
Scott> I think that's important to preserve, in order to support
Scott> the possibility of new outcomes.

My lack of confidence had more to do with doubting that our policies
would do what we

RE: A priori IPR choices

[Lawrence Rosen]

Ted Tso wrote:
> Since the letter was sent in January 2006, IBM has moved to a new way
> of dealing with patents and standards, with its "Interoperability
> Specification Pledge", which is essentially an irrovocable covenant
> not to assert any Necessary Claims to anyone making, using, importing,
> selling, or offerring for sale any Covered Implementations, with a
> broad defensive clause.  This was announced in July of this past year,


IBM's "Interoperability Specification Pledge" is fully consistent with the
patent policy I urge generally upon IETF. We should encourage companies to
adopt similar covenants for IETF specifications.

Thanks, IBM.

/Larry 


> -Original Message-
> From: Theodore Tso [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 6:40 AM
> To: Simon Josefsson
> Cc: Frank Ellermann; ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices
> 
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 03:10:29PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > "Frank Ellermann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> > Do you refer to the IBM patent on BOCU?  As far as I have understood,
> > IBM promised to grant a free patent license to people who requested it,
> > but people never received a license despite requesting one.  If this is
> > accurate, I think it is a good example of a technology that should not
> > be standardized and should not be promoted by the community.
> 
> Can someone give an example of someone who has requested a license but
> not received one, please?  (For reference, there is a copy of a letter
> which was apparently sent from IBM to the Unicode consortium here:
> http://unicode.org/notes/tn6/)
> 
> Since the letter was sent in January 2006, IBM has moved to a new way
> of dealing with patents and standards, with its "Interoperability
> Specification Pledge", which is essentially an irrovocable covenant
> not to assert any Necessary Claims to anyone making, using, importing,
> selling, or offerring for sale any Covered Implementations, with a
> broad defensive clause.  This was announced in July of this past year,
> and more details can be found here:
> 
>  http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/ispinfo.shtml
> 
> BOCU is not on the list of Covered Specifications, but my guess is
> that such an omission is very likely due to an oversight rather than
> any kind of maliciousness.  The good news is this new framework
> doesn't require any kind of formal request to obtain a patent license,
> and so hopefully a request to move the offer of a RF license covering
> BOCU to the Interopreability Specification Pledge framework would
> hopefully take care of your issue.
> 
>   - Ted
> 
> P.S.  All opinions stated above are my own, and do not necessarily
> reflect IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.
> 
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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Norbert Bollow]

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.


-- 
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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

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Theodore Tso]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 03:10:29PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> "Frank Ellermann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> Do you refer to the IBM patent on BOCU?  As far as I have understood,
> IBM promised to grant a free patent license to people who requested it,
> but people never received a license despite requesting one.  If this is
> accurate, I think it is a good example of a technology that should not
> be standardized and should not be promoted by the community.

Can someone give an example of someone who has requested a license but
not received one, please?  (For reference, there is a copy of a letter
which was apparently sent from IBM to the Unicode consortium here:
http://unicode.org/notes/tn6/)

Since the letter was sent in January 2006, IBM has moved to a new way
of dealing with patents and standards, with its "Interoperability
Specification Pledge", which is essentially an irrovocable covenant
not to assert any Necessary Claims to anyone making, using, importing,
selling, or offerring for sale any Covered Implementations, with a
broad defensive clause.  This was announced in July of this past year,
and more details can be found here:

 http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/ispinfo.shtml

BOCU is not on the list of Covered Specifications, but my guess is
that such an omission is very likely due to an oversight rather than
any kind of maliciousness.  The good news is this new framework
doesn't require any kind of formal request to obtain a patent license,
and so hopefully a request to move the offer of a RF license covering
BOCU to the Interopreability Specification Pledge framework would
hopefully take care of your issue.

- Ted

P.S.  All opinions stated above are my own, and do not necessarily
reflect IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[stephen . farrell]

> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:42:06 -0400
> Theodore Tso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>> I like this document a lot; kudo's to Simon for writing it!
>>
>> My personal opinion is that suggestions for how to write a free
>> standard published as an informational RFC is much more useful than
>> trying to get consensus around some edict that the IETF _only_ publish
>> free standards.
>>
> I agree.  There are a number of problems with the current draft (i.e.,
> the reference to RSA patents -- those expired years ago), but none that
> I think would block progress of the document.  This is definitely worth
> pursuing.

Me too. In a WG I've been involved with recently we had one
participant with a patent who wanted to make their declaration
open-source friendly but that took a few iterations (which
cost them lawyer time). If this document could help short-circuit
that, that'd be another good thing.

Stephen.



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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Simon Josefsson]

"Frank Ellermann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Simon Josefsson wrote:
>
>> I would even consider a requirement that in order to move beyond
>> Proposed Standard, a protocol needs to have a free implementation
>> available.
>
> Tricky, e.g. my BOCU-1 implementation is "free" in a certain sense,
> but I'm also sure that I don't have a license.  

Do you refer to the IBM patent on BOCU?  As far as I have understood,
IBM promised to grant a free patent license to people who requested it,
but people never received a license despite requesting one.  If this is
accurate, I think it is a good example of a technology that should not
be standardized and should not be promoted by the community.

BOCU would also be a good example of why promises to grant a free patent
license to those who request it is insufficient.

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'?

/Simon

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Sam Hartman]

> "Scott" == Scott Brim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Scott> On 22 Oct 2007 at 17:46 -0400, Sam Hartman allegedly wrote:
>> * Phil's proposal has been shot down prematurely in my opinion.
>> I agree that his current version would not fly.  However I do
>> think there are working groups that could make conclusions
>> about their patent policies and for which doing so would have
>> helped the effort a lot.

Scott> Working Groups have the freedom to do that if they wish.  I
Scott> don't want a simplistic edict from on high that all working
Scott> groups must do so.  Interactions between issues, technical
Scott> and otherwise, are way too varied and potentially
Scott> complicated for such shallow rule-making.

I agree that forcing working groups to make a decision at the
beginning would be bad.  I think the you must decide part of Phil's
proposal is one of the things that would have to go.  Phil may argue
that's the only value his proposal has; I disagree.

>> Working through draft-housley-tls-authz-extns gave me a
>> personal significant lack of confidence in our patent policies
>> and whether they meet our goals and objectives.  I also wonder
>> whether our goals and objectives may have shifted somewhat
>> since they were written.  However I'm definitely uncomfortable
>> with relying on our existing documents in any real dispute.

Scott> I think the problem is that because we have a wide range of
Scott> opinion and desired outcome, we cannot create simple rules,
Scott> which means the difficult cases take a lot of discussion.
Scott> I think that's important to preserve, in order to support
Scott> the possibility of new outcomes.

My lack of confidence had more to do with doubting that our policies
would do what we want in court, concerns that there are ambiguities,
lack of clarity and that sort of thing than that they allowed for
discussion.


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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Frank Ellermann]

Simon Josefsson wrote:

> I would even consider a requirement that in order to move beyond
> Proposed Standard, a protocol needs to have a free implementation
> available.

Tricky, e.g. my BOCU-1 implementation is "free" in a certain sense,
but I'm also sure that I don't have a license.  

Thanks for the new I-D.josefsson-free-standards-howto-01, I'm aware
of some folks in the SPF community who'll like it.
 
 Frank


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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Theodore Tso]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 01:05:39PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> "Frank Ellermann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > .
> 
> I noticed that the 00 draft would expire in two days, and submitted a 01
> with only minor changes.

I like this document a lot; kudo's to Simon for writing it!

My personal opinion is that suggestions for how to write a free
standard published as an informational RFC is much more useful than
trying to get consensus around some edict that the IETF _only_ publish
free standards.  

- Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:42:06 -0400
Theodore Tso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 01:05:39PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > "Frank Ellermann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > 
> > > .
> > 
> > I noticed that the 00 draft would expire in two days, and submitted
> > a 01 with only minor changes.
> 
> I like this document a lot; kudo's to Simon for writing it!
> 
> My personal opinion is that suggestions for how to write a free
> standard published as an informational RFC is much more useful than
> trying to get consensus around some edict that the IETF _only_ publish
> free standards.  
> 
I agree.  There are a number of problems with the current draft (i.e.,
the reference to RSA patents -- those expired years ago), but none that
I think would block progress of the document.  This is definitely worth
pursuing.


--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Scott Brim]

On 22 Oct 2007 at 17:46 -0400, Sam Hartman allegedly wrote:
> * Phil's proposal has been shot down prematurely in my opinion.  I
>   agree that his current version would not fly.  However I do think
>   there are working groups that could make conclusions about their
>   patent policies and for which doing so would have helped the
>   effort a lot.

Working Groups have the freedom to do that if they wish.  I don't want
a simplistic edict from on high that all working groups must do so.
Interactions between issues, technical and otherwise, are way too
varied and potentially complicated for such shallow rule-making.

> Working through draft-housley-tls-authz-extns gave me a personal
> significant lack of confidence in our patent policies and whether
> they meet our goals and objectives.  I also wonder whether our goals
> and objectives may have shifted somewhat since they were written.
> However I'm definitely uncomfortable with relying on our existing
> documents in any real dispute.

I think the problem is that because we have a wide range of opinion
and desired outcome, we cannot create simple rules, which means the
difficult cases take a lot of discussion.  I think that's important to
preserve, in order to support the possibility of new outcomes.

swb

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Simon Josefsson]

Norbert Bollow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>> 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.

I think that is a good recommendation, and I support it.

I would even consider a requirement that in order to move beyond
Proposed Standard, a protocol needs to have a free implementation
available.

/Simon

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Simon Josefsson]

"Frank Ellermann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> .

I noticed that the 00 draft would expire in two days, and submitted a 01
with only minor changes.

/Simon

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Norbert Bollow]

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

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Re: A priori IPR choices

[Frank Ellermann]

Sam Hartman wrote on the general list:

> I'd like to write in general support of re-evaluating several aspects
> of our patent policy.  I'm not quite writing in support of rechartering
> IPR at this time.  First, I think they have critical copyright work to
> finish.

+1

> Second, I think that we need to find a way to have the discussion in
> a productive forum.  I'm not entirely sure a rechartered IPR working
> group would do that.

If Simon supports it the IPR WG could adopt his draft
.

Cc: to the IPR list in support of John's unscheduled process experiment
with "a DoS attack on the IETF's getting other work done."  Add smiley.
 
 Frank


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2007-10-23 16:20, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
I'm confused by this part of the discussion. How can a standard be 
encumbered by GPL? As far as I know, GPL does not prevent anyone from 
implementing a standard without any restrictions or fees, just possibly 
from using somebody else's code under certain conditions. 


There's certainly a tricky point if code embedded in a standard
is explicitly subject to the GPL; that makes it effectively impossible
for a commercial implementor to use even fragments of that code
in a proprietary way.

I don't think 
that anybody is proposing that all implementations should be "free", in 
whatever sense of the word, just that free implementations can exist.


Thus, I consider this somewhat of a diversion.


Well, there's an inverse claim that some of the IETF's current rules
make it impossible to use material extracted from RFCs in open source
under certain OS licenses. But I agree that these copyright issues are
distinct from patent issues. The latter concern whether an implementor
can put code under a given OS license at all, depending on the exact
form of patent licence available. Not all OS licenses have this
problem, however.

Brian


Henning

On Oct 22, 2007, at 10:45 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:


On Monday 22 October 2007 16:27, John C Klensin wrote:


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.?


That sounds reasonable to me.  To promote global interoperability, 
standards

need to be implementable throughout the internet ecosystem, both Free and
Proprietary.

Scott K

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Henning Schulzrinne]

I'm confused by this part of the discussion. How can a standard be  
encumbered by GPL? As far as I know, GPL does not prevent anyone from  
implementing a standard without any restrictions or fees, just  
possibly from using somebody else's code under certain conditions. I  
don't think that anybody is proposing that all implementations should  
be "free", in whatever sense of the word, just that free  
implementations can exist.


Thus, I consider this somewhat of a diversion.

Henning

On Oct 22, 2007, at 10:45 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:


On Monday 22 October 2007 16:27, John C Klensin wrote:


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.?


That sounds reasonable to me.  To promote global interoperability,  
standards
need to be implementable throughout the internet ecosystem, both  
Free and

Proprietary.

Scott K

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Scott Kitterman]

On Monday 22 October 2007 16:27, John C Klensin wrote:

> 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.?

That sounds reasonable to me.  To promote global interoperability, standards 
need to be implementable throughout the internet ecosystem, both Free and 
Proprietary.  

Scott K

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Sam Hartman]

For what it's worth, I'd like to write in general support of
re-evaluating several aspects of our patent policy.  I 'm not quite
writing in support of rechartering IPR at this time.  First, I think
they have critical copyright work to finish.  Second, I think that we
need to find a way to have the discussion in a productive forum.  I'm
not entirely sure a rechartered IPR working group would do that.

Here are some examples of questions I think it might be desirable to
consider:

* Establishing a clear category for some sort of
  open-source-compatible licensing terms.  We seem to think that
  royalty-free is good enough in our current policy, but that is
  demonstrably false.

* Evaluating whether our IPR policies are adequate to actually provide
  enforcement when people violate them.  What recourse do we have when
  people violate our policies; what recourse do users of our specs
  have?  Is this sufficient for our needs?  If we had different
  policies how much better would things be?



* Phil's proposal has been shot down prematurely in my opinion.  I
  agree that his current version would not fly.  However I do think
  there are working groups that could make conclusions about their
  patent policies and for which doing so would have helped the effort
  a lot.  I think sacred and dnsext are such working groups.  I think
  you could get consensus in krb-wg that patented technology is
  problematic in our standards.  However I'm not sure it would be
  useful as I don't think it would save much time.  I think
  considering whether there are aspects of Phil's proposals it would
  be useful to adopt might be useful.

Working through draft-housley-tls-authz-extns gave me a personal
significant lack of confidence in our patent policies and whether they
meet our goals and objectives.  I also wonder whether our goals and
objectives may have shifted somewhat since they were written.  However
I'm definitely uncomfortable with relying on our existing documents in
any real dispute.


In conclusion, I think Larry's proposed rechartering is an appropriate
contribution to this list.  While we may not ultimately decide to
follow his course of action, I think it an appropriate contribution.
I do not think he is attempting to DOS the process and believe he is
participating in good faith.

--Sam


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[John C Klensin]

--On Monday, 22 October, 2007 21:57 +0200 Norbert Bollow
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 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.

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 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, and that, if the IETF had procedures similar or
equivalent to theirs, we would not be hearing about it again on
this list.

>> 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.

First, no persuasive evidence has been produced on this list
that this economic importance is, in fact, increasing.  The
economic importance may well be increasing for some categories
of encumbrances, or for some categories of implementations but I
don't believe a statement this broad can be justified.  

Second, while such increasing importance, were it to exist,
would justify a review of the policies, it doesn't automatically
lead to the conclusion that Larry (and presumably you) support.
In addition, "the past" isn't a long time here.   The IETF
policies were not established a decade or two ago and never
reviewed since: the question has been raised over and over again
as to whether the IETF, or various WGs, want to review the
policies, and the answer comes back "no".  So, even if the
economic importance has increased as you suggest, or other
arguments for unencumbered software exist, how often do you
think that requires review of the policies?  Once every few
years?  Once a year?  Once a month?  Once every two weeks until
you get your way and then never again?There comes a point
beyond which the raising of this position is a DoS attack on the
IETF's getting other work done.

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.?

>> 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?

I have seen nothing new in any of Larry's postings, or Simon's
postings, or other postings supporting their general positions,
in the last two months, so perhaps you could use that list as a
starting point.

best,
   john



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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Lawrence Rosen]

John Klensin wrote:
> 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.  Neither repeating those arguments, nor
> making the assumption that the IETF agrees with your goals and
> priorities, seems to be causing progress in this area.   What it
> does accomplish is to get people to stop reading threads on this
> subject, which further lowers the odds of getting IETF consensus
> on a change in position.

John and others,

I have never made my proposal on ietf@ietf.org before. Indeed, I only
started contributing on this list recently. I'm pleased that YOU have heard
my arguments before in other venues, but there's no reason to assume that
others here have done so. I don't assume that IETF agrees with my goals or
priorities, nor perhaps do you have any reason to assume that the broader
IETF community agrees with you. 

I made my suggestion here to re-charter the IPR-WG after lurking on the list
for long enough to understand (I hope) the issues that this list considers
and the cultural environment in which those considerations occur, and long
after I became convinced that at least some of the people participating on
the much narrower IPR-WG list were culturally and philosophically unwilling
to listen to *any* arguments that IETF patent policy should be clarified or
changed. 

Your reference to the older and more stubbornly traditional ISO, IEC and
IEEE merely reminds me of important counter-examples, W3C and OASIS. Each
standards organization needs to articulate its patent policy in light of its
own mission and culture. IETF is a world-wide organization of volunteers
that standardizes much of the Internet. This is an *open* Internet,
available to all. Encumbering it with non-free patents is a danger that W3C
and OASIS have addressed. I suggest that IETF should address it too!

So please stand back a bit, John, and let the arguments on all sides be
fairly raised and rebutted before the participants on this list. Let's see
if consensus does arise here. Please don't assume, as I don't assume, that
everyone who has an opinion has already spoken up. 

I hope that others here will speak up.

***

Once again, specifically what I request is that we charter the IETF IPR-WG
to propose policies and procedures, consistent with the worldwide mission of
IETF, which will result in IETF specifications unencumbered by restrictive,
non-free patents.

***


> -Original Message-
> From: John C Klensin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 11:15 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-
> authz-extns]
> 
> 
> 
> --On Saturday, 20 October, 2007 19:15 -0700 Lawrence Rosen
> <[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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.  Neither repeating those arguments, nor
> making the assumption that the IETF agrees with your goals and
> priorities, seems to be causing progress in this area.   What it
> does accomplish is to get people to stop reading threads on this
> subject, which further lowers the odds of getting IETF consensus
> on a change in position.
> 
> Just my opinion, of course.
> john


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Norbert Bollow]

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

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[John C Klensin]

--On Saturday, 20 October, 2007 19:15 -0700 Lawrence Rosen
<[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.

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.

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.  Neither repeating those arguments, nor
making the assumption that the IETF agrees with your goals and
priorities, seems to be causing progress in this area.   What it
does accomplish is to get people to stop reading threads on this
subject, which further lowers the odds of getting IETF consensus
on a change in position.

Just my opinion, of course.
john


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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[David Morris]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007, Lawrence Rosen wrote:

> Brian Carpenter wrote:
> > ... so that the
> > goal of 100% unencumbered standards is unrealistic.
>...
> But we're talking here about IETF standards, specifications that are
> prepared cooperatively and for free by talented individuals, companies and

For 'free' ??? I expect you'll find that that for the majority of IETF
partcipants, participation is part of what they do for their employers.
Meeting fees and expenses are re-imbursed, etc.

That is merely informed self interest.

> countries around the world. These specifications are intended for
> implementation everywhere to facilitate communications among us all. None of
> us want patent surprises when we implement IETF specifications. Everyone
> expects IETF to take reasonable steps, consistent with its fundamental
> technical mission, to de-mine the patent landscape so that anyone can
> implement our worldwide specifications in products of all types.

Actually, there is GREAT value in having a widely used protocol well
documented, even if it is encumbered by IPR restrictions. I personally
have no objection to having the IETF publish RFCs which depend in whole or
part on encumbered technologies as long as those restrictions are
documented in the RFC.

As a matter of courtesy, the existance of such encumberances should be
revealed when known to an individual associated with the process of
submitting the information to any group associated with the IETF. We need
to be careful however to make any IPR decisions based the merits of the
technical issues and NOT based on our frustration that notification wasn't
timely.

I consider it a given that the best the IETF can achieve is to recognize
IPR known to participants in the IETF process. Given the nature of patent
and copyright processes, there is no way to insure that a seemingly new
idea conceived by an IETF working group isn't already encumbered.

It is my observation that the IETF tends to operate in two modes:
  a. Documenting or revising the documentation of existing protocols
  b. Designing protocols (or improvements) to solve previously unresolved
 problems
In mode 'a', documenation may be independant submissions as well as
organized activities of the IETF community. To publish an independant
submission requires some attention from the community, the RFC editor,
etc. The question is whether publication will contribute to the community.
Knowning how a totally encumbered protocol works, may facilitate the
design of related protocols or simply help network engineers keep their
portion of the Internet operational. If so, the publication effort is
probably justified.

The remaining mode 'a' activity, as the organized work product of the
IETF, likely a WG, should have IPR handled as in mode 'b'. The addition of
IPR encumbered technology to a protocol should be a decision based on
technical merits. It makes no sense to determine before specific
technology has been identified for consideration that encumbered
technology can't be considered. I have seen enough disagreements within
the IETF as to what is the best technology that I know that comparison of
techologies won't be easy when there is no known encumberance. But I would
hope that a good technical design will prevale. In the end, the
Internet wide operating cost associated with using less than optimal
technology shouldn't exceed the expected costs associated with use of
encumbered technology.

It should be clear that all known encumberances MUST be documented in an
RFC which utilizes the technology. A participant in the IETF process
should never bring technology to the IETF they know or believe to be
encumbered without revealing those encumberances. Furthermore, they
should never advocate adoption of technology from which they will directly
or indirectly benefit in come tangible way. If an individual is aware
of technology encumberances which they can't reveal, they should drop out
of the related working groups or other IETF organized discussions.

It really isn't socially acceptable to entrap IETF participants with
enticing techology whose encumberances aren't revealed.

David Morris

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

Different era.

Today we have had several companies burnes for up to half a billion dollars 
with piffle patents.

When tcpip was being written the patent office had not become a profit center, 
the seven nos were still an issue.


Sent from my GoodLink Wireless Handheld (www.good.com)

 -Original Message-
From:   Brian E Carpenter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent:   Saturday, October 20, 2007 12:26 PM Pacific Standard Time
To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Cc: Ted Hardie; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ietf@ietf.org; Contreras, Jorge
Subject:Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last 
Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

Phill,

> If there were in addition some standard non disclosure contracts, standard 
> contracts for holding pre-standards meeting and the like the result could be 
> turned into a book which most managers in the valley would probably end up 
> buying. 

Most of them, and those in Armonk that I used to work for, bought Section 10 of 
RFC 2026 and its successors. Certainly, open 
source was less of a factor when that regime was designed, but Linux still 
supports TCP/IP as far as I know. So I think the 
experimental evidence supports the arguments you're hearing from me, Ted and 
others.

Don't confuse that with a liking for standards encumbered by patents with 
expensive licensing conditions. It's simply a matter 
of finding a pragmatic compromise in a world where software patents are 
granted, and often upheld by the courts, so that the 
goal of 100% unencumbered standards is unrealistic.

Brian
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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[David Harrington]

Hi,

I do not think there is consensus that what you want is what the IETF
wants.

David Harrington
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


> -Original Message-
> From: Lawrence Rosen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 6:46 AM
> To: ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third 
> LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]
> 
> Ted Hardie wrote:
> > Ah, I see why you appear to have changed your position.   
> You actually
> > want the result you're arguing for built into the charter of
> > the IPR working group,  beforehand without letting the 
> community actually
> > discuss it. Thanks for re-affirming my faith in your 
> consistency.
> 
> You're welcome. To state it more fairly, I want the result 
> I'm arguing for
> to be built into the charter so that the WG can examine 
> fairly what it will
> take to reach that goal. The WG cannot adopt a policy for 
> IETF, only propose
> one. But the WG's work should be goal-directed.
> 
> By the way, that's not such a change of tactic for that 
> particular IPR-WG.
> You previously argued in committee that the current IETF 
> patent policy is
> NOT a problem, and in that spirit the IPR-WG previously buried every
> counter-proposal we made as "off-charter"! So let's play the 
> charter game
> fairly, please, by the same rules you played them. Let's 
> charter the IPR-WG
> to develop a proposal that achieves a specific goal to fix a
perceived
> patent problem. You can always argue against it in committee 
> or vote against
> it if a serious proposal toward that goal gets before the 
> IETF as a whole.
> 
> /Larry Rosen
> 
> 
> 
> ___
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> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
> 



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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[David Harrington]

 

> -Original Message-
> From: Lawrence Rosen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2007 10:16 AM
> To: ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third 
> LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]
> 
> [...] Everyone
> expects IETF to take reasonable steps, consistent with its
fundamental
> technical mission, to de-mine the patent landscape so that anyone
can
> implement our worldwide specifications in products of all types.
> 

I don't presume to speak for everyone. 
I expect the IETF to take reasonable steps to de-mine the patent
landscape related to our own policies, so that anyone can implement
our worldwide specifications in products of all types. 

I expect those reasonable steps to include IPR disclosure by
participants in the process, and where IPR has been disclosed, the
IETF should discuss the tradeoffs and make a decision about whether
IPR-encumbrance is acceptable.

I do NOT expect those reasonable steps to include declaring that all
companies contributing to a standard must give away associated IPR for
free, to suit the open source community. I think it is an unreasonable
demand from the open source community, and it is the licensing terms
of open source implementations that place limitations on implementing
our worldwide specifications in products of all types.

David Harrington
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 




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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Lawrence Rosen]

Brian Carpenter wrote:
> ... so that the
> goal of 100% unencumbered standards is unrealistic.

That's almost certainly true. The world is full of encumbered standards,
including in products I buy and use every day. I agree with you that THAT
goal is unrealistic. No Don Quixote here! In fact, most IP attorneys like me
support the freedom of individuals and companies to seek patents on their
inventive technology and to profit - alone or in legal combination with
their business partners - with products that implement those patents.

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. None of
us want patent surprises when we implement IETF specifications. Everyone
expects IETF to take reasonable steps, consistent with its fundamental
technical mission, to de-mine the patent landscape so that anyone can
implement our worldwide specifications in products of all types.

I'm not proposing unrealistic goals, but instead proposing this more limited
IETF-centric goal of free standards for IETF specifications. That is why I
suggested that as a charter for the IPR-WG to review and propose how to make
it happen here. 

As for those other non-IETF patent-encumbered standards: They can probably
survive without IETF's free help.

/Larry


> -Original Message-
> From: Brian E Carpenter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 12:27 PM
> To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
> Cc: Ted Hardie; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ietf@ietf.org; Contreras, Jorge
> Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-
> authz-extns]
> 
> Phill,
> 
> > If there were in addition some standard non disclosure contracts,
> standard contracts for holding pre-standards meeting and the like the
> result could be turned into a book which most managers in the valley would
> probably end up buying.
> 
> Most of them, and those in Armonk that I used to work for, bought Section
> 10 of RFC 2026 and its successors. Certainly, open
> source was less of a factor when that regime was designed, but Linux still
> supports TCP/IP as far as I know. So I think the
> experimental evidence supports the arguments you're hearing from me, Ted
> and others.
> 
> Don't confuse that with a liking for standards encumbered by patents with
> expensive licensing conditions. It's simply a matter
> of finding a pragmatic compromise in a world where software patents are
> granted, and often upheld by the courts, so that the
> goal of 100% unencumbered standards is unrealistic.
> 
> Brian


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Brian E Carpenter]

Phill,

If there were in addition some standard non disclosure contracts, standard contracts for holding pre-standards meeting and the like the result could be turned into a book which most managers in the valley would probably end up buying. 


Most of them, and those in Armonk that I used to work for, bought Section 10 of RFC 2026 and its successors. Certainly, open 
source was less of a factor when that regime was designed, but Linux still supports TCP/IP as far as I know. So I think the 
experimental evidence supports the arguments you're hearing from me, Ted and others.


Don't confuse that with a liking for standards encumbered by patents with expensive licensing conditions. It's simply a matter 
of finding a pragmatic compromise in a world where software patents are granted, and often upheld by the courts, so that the 
goal of 100% unencumbered standards is unrealistic.


   Brian

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

The question is whether in the light of the SCO vs IBM case the reciprocity 
clauses actually have the intended effect.
 
Having been involved in the license issues surrounding WS-* I do not beleive 
that it is possible to construct an open license that is compatible with open 
source practices and is reliably effective in preventing litigation from 
parties that are using the technology without reciprocation.
 
Fortunately it turns out that this is not a requirement. Open Source projects 
do not want a license, and the IPR holder don't actually want to have to issue 
one. All that everyone wants in this is to not get sued. So the Microsoft Open 
Promise type approach is definitely the one that we should be looking to adopt 
going forward.
 
What would be useful is if we had a small number of standard legal 
deeds/licenses/contracts/whatever released under a creative commons type 
license for this type of arrangement. 
 
 
If there were in addition some standard non disclosure contracts, standard 
contracts for holding pre-standards meeting and the like the result could be 
turned into a book which most managers in the valley would probably end up 
buying. 



From: Ted Hardie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Fri 19/10/2007 5:32 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ietf@ietf.org
Cc: 'Contreras, Jorge'
Subject: RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last 
Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]



At 1:58 PM -0700 10/19/07, Ted Hardie wrote:
>Cisco has probably disclosed the most patents in an
>IETF context (163 disclosures in any case; I'm having trouble getting the
>tool to give me comparisons), but its licenses don't seem to have allowed
>both open source and proprietary implementations.

My apologies for the major typo.  I meant "don't seem to have prevented".
Sorry for the goof,
Ted

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Joel M. Halpern]

Actually, I saw the quesiton of whether the charter should be 
extended into re-visiting the patent rules fairly discussed in the 
working group.  (Which is the usual place to decide if we even want 
to do the work.)  You were aware of and involved in the 
discussion.  The rough consensus of the working group was that there 
was not a need to revisit the existing IETF patent policy.  So the 
chairs did not ask the IESG to consider making such a change.


Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 06:45 PM 10/19/2007, Lawrence Rosen wrote:

Ted Hardie wrote:
> Ah, I see why you appear to have changed your position.   You actually
> want the result you're arguing for built into the charter of
> the IPR working group,  beforehand without letting the community actually
> discuss it. Thanks for re-affirming my faith in your consistency.

You're welcome. To state it more fairly, I want the result I'm arguing for
to be built into the charter so that the WG can examine fairly what it will
take to reach that goal. The WG cannot adopt a policy for IETF, only propose
one. But the WG's work should be goal-directed.

By the way, that's not such a change of tactic for that particular IPR-WG.
You previously argued in committee that the current IETF patent policy is
NOT a problem, and in that spirit the IPR-WG previously buried every
counter-proposal we made as "off-charter"! So let's play the charter game
fairly, please, by the same rules you played them. Let's charter the IPR-WG
to develop a proposal that achieves a specific goal to fix a perceived
patent problem. You can always argue against it in committee or vote against
it if a serious proposal toward that goal gets before the IETF as a whole.

/Larry Rosen



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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

Brian,
 
I agree that nobody can know in advance if they will have IPR issues at the 
end. What I am arguing for is that the set of possible end points is known in 
advance. 



From: Brian E Carpenter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Fri 19/10/2007 4:34 PM
To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Cc: Simon Josefsson; Tim Polk; ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call: 
draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]



Phill,

> If folk can't get their act together when a WG starts then why should we 
> expect them to be able to do so at the end when we are trying to close the 
> work?

Because of the difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

At the beginning, you're asking an entirely hypothetical question about 
potential patents on undesigned technology.

At the end, you're asking a precise question about applied-for or granted 
patents on specific technology.

There's a world of difference, especially since the IETF only requires 
disclosure of patents reasonably and personally known to
the individual contributor.

Brian


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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Ted Hardie]

At 3:45 PM -0700 10/19/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
>Ted Hardie wrote:
>> Ah, I see why you appear to have changed your position.   You actually
>> want the result you're arguing for built into the charter of
>> the IPR working group,  beforehand without letting the community actually
>> discuss it. Thanks for re-affirming my faith in your consistency.
>
>You're welcome. To state it more fairly, I want the result I'm arguing for
>to be built into the charter so that the WG can examine fairly what it will
>take to reach that goal. The WG cannot adopt a policy for IETF, only propose
>one. But the WG's work should be goal-directed.

What you seem to be missing is a step where the WG agrees that this is
the goal.  The steps we've taken in the past are:

Check to see if we have agreement to open the current policies for change.
If we have that agreement, develop proposals for what that change would be.
Agree on the set of changes in broad scope.
Write documents that set out the new policies.
Get community consensus on the documents which lay out the changes
and the resulting policies.

You don't have step one done yet, and you are jumping to the end of 3, where
you are pre-supposing what the result of the agreed set of changes would be.

>
>By the way, that's not such a change of tactic for that particular IPR-WG.
>You previously argued in committee that the current IETF patent policy is
>NOT a problem, and in that spirit the IPR-WG previously buried every
>counter-proposal we made as "off-charter"!

I'm not sure what you mean by "in committee" above.  I have certainly
made comments on the IPR working group mailing list.  It has open archives,
and I encourage folks who are considering opening up the charter to consider
changes to it actually read them, along with the documents it has produced.

I also note above the nice shift in subject, from "you previously argued"
to "in that spirit the IPR-WG previously buried".  Let me rephrase this:
"After discussion that included comments by you (Ted Hardie),
the IPR working group came to consensus not to reconsider
the patent policy.  After that decision, proposals to change it were ruled
off charter."  I had a heck of lot less to do with it than that makes it appear
since I have never chaired the group, written any of its documents, or been
its AD; I have my opinions, but I never buried anything.


>So let's play the charter game
>fairly, please, by the same rules you played them.

Let's run the charter process fairly indeed.  We can start by not pretending
it's a win/loss game, and agree that it is a process of getting the community
to agree on what work it is willing to take on, without artificially starting
with a "specific goal" that presupposes an agreement that has not been
demonstrated.  

Have a lovely weekend Larry,
Ted






>/Larry Rosen
>
>
>
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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Lawrence Rosen]

Ted Hardie wrote:
> Ah, I see why you appear to have changed your position.   You actually
> want the result you're arguing for built into the charter of
> the IPR working group,  beforehand without letting the community actually
> discuss it. Thanks for re-affirming my faith in your consistency.

You're welcome. To state it more fairly, I want the result I'm arguing for
to be built into the charter so that the WG can examine fairly what it will
take to reach that goal. The WG cannot adopt a policy for IETF, only propose
one. But the WG's work should be goal-directed.

By the way, that's not such a change of tactic for that particular IPR-WG.
You previously argued in committee that the current IETF patent policy is
NOT a problem, and in that spirit the IPR-WG previously buried every
counter-proposal we made as "off-charter"! So let's play the charter game
fairly, please, by the same rules you played them. Let's charter the IPR-WG
to develop a proposal that achieves a specific goal to fix a perceived
patent problem. You can always argue against it in committee or vote against
it if a serious proposal toward that goal gets before the IETF as a whole.

/Larry Rosen



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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Ted Hardie]

At 1:58 PM -0700 10/19/07, Ted Hardie wrote:
>Cisco has probably disclosed the most patents in an
>IETF context (163 disclosures in any case; I'm having trouble getting the
>tool to give me comparisons), but its licenses don't seem to have allowed
>both open source and proprietary implementations. 

My apologies for the major typo.  I meant "don't seem to have prevented".
Sorry for the goof,
Ted

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Ted Hardie]

> I DO want IETF to
>adopt policies concerning the disclosure of patents when known by WG
>participants, and the mandatory licensing of those patents for free by those
>patent owners who actually participate in and contribute to a specification,
>or alternatively the withdrawal of that specification as an IETF standard.

The IETF already has policies about disclosures of patents when known by
working group participants, as you well know.

This sounds like you want the IETF as whole to make this decision prior
to any work of a working group, and without any working group consideration
of whether the benefits of a licensed technology support its selection for
a particular context.

>Otherwise, to speak freely here, patent-encumbered specifications that we
>waste our time creating are useless for open source and many proprietary
>implementations.

"waste our time" is a pretty loaded phrase.  "open source" also covers
a wide variety of licenses, and it's only when the open source developer
actually sees  the patent and the offered license that this determination
can be made.  Cisco has probably disclosed the most patents in an
IETF context (163 disclosures in any case; I'm having trouble getting the
tool to give me comparisons), but its licenses don't seem to have allowed
both open source and proprietary implementations.  Yet they clearly
are encumbered.

Patent-encumbered specification that *we choose to develop with the
knowledge of those patents* may be in the best interests of the Internet,
at least as well as an open process can determine.We'll never have
perfect knowledge, obviously, as someone not participating may end up
claiming patent coverage.  But ruling it out without letting a working
group balance technology and license is worse than where we are now,
at least in my view. 


>But I go beyond where we are already. The policy we need should not be
>debated here yet. This is too big a list for that discussion.

Funny, you objected that it should be here the last time I suggested that
the IPR working group list was the best place for this discussion.  You
said it was strangled in committee the last time the community debated
it there.


>What I request is that we charter the IETF IPR-WG to propose policies and
>procedures, consistent with the worldwide mission of IETF, which will result
>in IETF specifications unencumbered by restrictive, non-free patents.

Ah, I see why you appear to have changed your position.   You actually
want the result you're arguing for built into the charter of
the IPR working group,  beforehand without letting the community actually
discuss it. Thanks for re-affirming my faith in your consistency.


>That's a simple charter for the IPR-WG. Not so simple perhaps to guarantee
>consensus even on definitions, and perhaps it won't result in a single
>formal proposal, but it needs to be addressed. The IPR-WG is an appropriate
>place for that activity.
>

If you want to argue for a change in the charter of the IPR working group,
you can certainly do it on that list.  But, please, do realize you have to
get the community to agree on the charter goals first.   No one in the
IETF, including the IESG, has the right to change the goals of a working
group without community input and agreement.  The ability to review
and comment on that kind of thing is something a lot of people value
around here.

Speaking only for myself,

Ted Hardie

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Brian E Carpenter]

Phill,


If folk can't get their act together when a WG starts then why should we expect 
them to be able to do so at the end when we are trying to close the work?


Because of the difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

At the beginning, you're asking an entirely hypothetical question about 
potential patents on undesigned technology.

At the end, you're asking a precise question about applied-for or granted 
patents on specific technology.

There's a world of difference, especially since the IETF only requires disclosure of patents reasonably and personally known to 
the individual contributor.


   Brian

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Lawrence Rosen]

Paul Hoffman wrote:
> "Early on" is much different than "when the WG is formed". It is
> reasonable to talk about IPR desired *on a particular technology*
> when that technology begins to be discussed in the WG.

And so, if our reasonable policy is that the "IPR desired" on IETF's
standardized Internet technologies shall ab initio be free (in several
senses of the word "free" to be defined later), then we must deal with
patents "early on." Like now

You probably mean a narrower definition of "technology" than I intend, which
includes *all* of IETF's Internet specifications. I'm after a resolution of
IETF policy regarding patent-encumbered IETF specifications wherever they
appear, not some rule that requires each WG to look for and compare patents
to technology. I never suggested that each WG start or end its
standardization process by looking for patents. What a waste that would be!
Even the companies that own those patents refuse to take the time to do that
before their employees join a WG. 

I agree with you that IETF should only address specific patents in the
context of a specific technology (or set of technologies) when the patent
landscape becomes clearer during WG activities. That may happen early on or
later, as ideas ferment and as patents become known.

Several of you are twisting my recommendations about policy into a threat to
the independent creativity of each WG. I DON'T want each WG to worry about
patents unless non-free patents actually are discovered. I DO want IETF to
adopt policies concerning the disclosure of patents when known by WG
participants, and the mandatory licensing of those patents for free by those
patent owners who actually participate in and contribute to a specification,
or alternatively the withdrawal of that specification as an IETF standard. 

Otherwise, to speak freely here, patent-encumbered specifications that we
waste our time creating are useless for open source and many proprietary
implementations.

But I go beyond where we are already. The policy we need should not be
debated here yet. This is too big a list for that discussion. 

What I request is that we charter the IETF IPR-WG to propose policies and
procedures, consistent with the worldwide mission of IETF, which will result
in IETF specifications unencumbered by restrictive, non-free patents.

That's a simple charter for the IPR-WG. Not so simple perhaps to guarantee
consensus even on definitions, and perhaps it won't result in a single
formal proposal, but it needs to be addressed. The IPR-WG is an appropriate
place for that activity.

/Larry Rosen


> -Original Message-
> From: Paul Hoffman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 8:43 AM
> To: Simon Josefsson
> Cc: ietf@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-
> authz-extns]
> 
> At 10:46 AM +0200 10/19/07, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> >Paul Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> >>  At 4:10 PM -0700 10/18/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
> >>>Isn't it preferable to get into early battles over IP rules--and make
> sure
> >>>those rules are clear to WG participants--before we have wasted our
> time and
> >>>resources developing specifications that half the world (or more) can't
> >>>implement?
> >>
> >>  I don't know which of the IETF WGs you have been involved with, but
> >>  that hasn't been the case for any of the ones I have dealt with. Could
> >>  you give an example of an WG in which this would have been preferable?
> >
> >The DNSEXT WG is a good example where patented technology has been
> >presented and time has been spent on discussing what to do with it.
> >Some time later the working group drafted a requirements document (RFC
> >4986) which contained the following requirement '5.2.  No Known
> >Intellectual Property Encumbrance'.
> 
> This is a good example of how Lawrence's proposal would not have
> worked. The technology you are talking about came up years after the
> WG was formed.
> 
> >The inclination to standardize only non-patented technology in DNSEXT is
> >fairly strong.  If the WG had made the policy explicit early on, the
> >discussions related to the patented ideas could have been more easily
> >dismissed.  Time could be spent on more productive work.
> 
> "Early on" is much different than "when the WG is formed". It is
> reasonable to talk about IPR desired *on a particular technology*
> when that technology begins to be discussed in the WG.
> 
> --Paul Hoffman, Director
> --VPN Consortium
> 
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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 07:21:55PM -0700,
 Paul Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote 
 a message of 35 lines which said:

> Could you give an example of an WG in which this would have been
> preferable?

MARID, certainly.

> Yes, there are a few engineers in the IETF who like to play armchair
> lawyer and would love to spend the initial time of WG formation
> pontificating about IPR, but they are in the small minority. Such a
> discussion would be of no interest to the folks who want to do good
> technical work.

You mean that everyone who disagrees with the current IPR policy of
IETF is not wanting to do good technical work? And that people
genuinely interested in a better IPR policy are just "armchair
lawyers"? Seems quite despising.


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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

I would expect RAND charters to be issued rarely if at all. I would only expect 
a RAND charter to issue if there was some overwhelmingly compelling IPR that 
everyone agreed is simply indispensible.
 
The only case I can remember where this was the case in the past was public key 
cryptography. The only current area of networking where I see a compelling set 
of IPR is in the content rights management space, and I don't think the patent 
issues would be the only barrier to working on that problem in the IETF.
 
We already have a notice requirement. I would certainly like to see Note Well 
being made much more prominent, in particular I think that there should be 
mandatory Note Well notices presented in the registration process for every 
IETF WG mailing list. I would also like to see all lists managed by the IETF 
directly and a comprehensive archive kept with digitally notorized records of 
all subscriptions, posts, unsubscriptions, drafts, etc.
 
The only thing that would change here is that when a company does declare IPR 
it knows that there are only three possible outcomes:
 
1) The WG works around the IPR claim, either changing the specification to 
avoid the claim or if the claim is obviouly spurious rejecting it (i.e. if 
someone claims that their patent on a new method of swinging covers HTTP it can 
probably be simply noted).
 
2) The IPR holder makes an irrevocable pledge to grant a RANDZ license to any 
party implementing the specification that agrees not to enforce its own IPR 
claims with respect to the specification on the IPR holder.
 
3) The WG droes not proceed with the work item in question. The only way to 
proceed at this point is to either charter a new WG under RAND terms, to submit 
the work as a personal submission on RAND terms, to proceed in another venue 
with different IPR terms or to not proceed at all.
 
There is absolutely no change in the preconditions. Note Well applies today and 
will under the new rules. The only difference is that we have eliminated a 
fourth option that exists today:
 
4) Argue for the work continuing in the WG on terms that are not RANDZ, are not 
compatible with open source licensing, commercial use, contain viral poison 
pills, or otherwise objectionable.
 
The decision of which of the three outcomes to choose cannot be made till the 
end of the process for the simple reason that we don't know what the spec will 
be like until then. A concern of mine is always the last minute change that 
pushes a spec into IPR hell.
 
 
I have very rarely seen IPR issues with the core of a standards based protocol. 
If you have a strong hold on the IPR then the topic has to be pretty huge to 
make the overhead of standards work worthwhile. If you have cast iron IPR and a 
compelling value proposition you can set the standards yourself unilaterally. 
And why should the rest of the community give their time to create the 
technology if thewy are going to pass through your toll booth?
 
What is much more common is the optional extension that is patent encumbered. I 
have a few patent applications of that type. But I don't go smurfing them here 
or anywhere else.



From: Scott Brim [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thu 18/10/2007 6:12 PM
To: Brian E Carpenter
Cc: Hallam-Baker, Phillip; Simon Josefsson; ietf@ietf.org; Tim Polk
Subject: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last 
Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]



On 19 Oct 2007 at 10:30 +1300, Brian E Carpenter allegedly wrote:
> On 2007-10-19 05:47, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> > What I would suggest is that new working groups be required to
> > specify the governing IPR rules in their charter, these would be
> > either that all IPR must be offered according to an open grant on
> > W3C terms or that the working group specifies at the outset that
> > RAND terms are acceptable.
>
> Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori
> processes kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies, and
> generally inhibit free discussion of initial ideas. Although it's
> messier to confront patent issues later in the process, I believe
> that is much better than constraining participation at the
> beginning.

+1

Otherwise you get into battles over theory and ideology without any of
the information you need to make a decision.  You will still be able
to take your stance once the technical tradeoffs are worked out.


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Thomas Narten]

> The DNSEXT WG is a good example where patented technology has been
> presented and time has been spent on discussing what to do with it.
> Some time later the working group drafted a requirements document (RFC
> 4986) which contained the following requirement '5.2.  No Known
> Intellectual Property Encumbrance'.

And is the text you quote specific to all DNS technology? Or just that
one that is the subject of the document you cite? (To be clear, it is
the latter.)

> The inclination to standardize only non-patented technology in DNSEXT is
> fairly strong.

Yes, but the discussion still works best on a technology-by-technology
basis, not on the broad "all DNS technology" swath that would be
implied if the decision had to be made at WG formation time.

Thomas

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Ted Hardie]

At 8:42 AM -0700 10/19/07, Paul Hoffman wrote:
>>The inclination to standardize only non-patented technology in DNSEXT is
>>fairly strong.  If the WG had made the policy explicit early on, the
>>discussions related to the patented ideas could have been more easily
>>dismissed.  Time could be spent on more productive work.
>
>"Early on" is much different than "when the WG is formed". It is reasonable to 
>talk about IPR desired *on a particular technology* when that technology 
>begins to be discussed in the WG.

I think this is a critical point.  The IETF has historically decided whether to
deal with licenses when it is faced with a specific technology.  That has the
real advantage that the contributors can consider the trade-offs (way X is
known to be encumbered, with a license required; way Y is not
known to be encumbered, but involves new code paths that will likely be
slower).  For some working groups, we start out with a technology under
consideration and "early on in discussion of a technology" and "when the
working group starts" may be pretty similar from the point of view of
considering that trade-off.  For other working groups (DNSEXT is one example,
DHC is another), the long-lived nature of their charters and the continual
emergence of newly related technologies means that "early on in discussion
of a technology" may be years later than "when the working group starts".

Speaking personally, I believe the ability to consider that trade-off is
a very good thing, and I would hate to lose it.  I also think that making
that decision in the working group is the best way, despite it being very
messy in many cases, because we  get the strongest participation from
the community of developers and deployers there.


regards,
Ted

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Paul Hoffman]

At 10:46 AM +0200 10/19/07, Simon Josefsson wrote:

Paul Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:


 At 4:10 PM -0700 10/18/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote:

Isn't it preferable to get into early battles over IP rules--and make sure
those rules are clear to WG participants--before we have wasted our time and
resources developing specifications that half the world (or more) can't
implement?


 I don't know which of the IETF WGs you have been involved with, but
 that hasn't been the case for any of the ones I have dealt with. Could
 you give an example of an WG in which this would have been preferable?


The DNSEXT WG is a good example where patented technology has been
presented and time has been spent on discussing what to do with it.
Some time later the working group drafted a requirements document (RFC
4986) which contained the following requirement '5.2.  No Known
Intellectual Property Encumbrance'.


This is a good example of how Lawrence's proposal would not have 
worked. The technology you are talking about came up years after the 
WG was formed.



The inclination to standardize only non-patented technology in DNSEXT is
fairly strong.  If the WG had made the policy explicit early on, the
discussions related to the patented ideas could have been more easily
dismissed.  Time could be spent on more productive work.


"Early on" is much different than "when the WG is formed". It is 
reasonable to talk about IPR desired *on a particular technology* 
when that technology begins to be discussed in the WG.


--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Hallam-Baker, Phillip]

The large organizations do not seem to have any problem participating in OASIS 
where this is the rule. Admittedly there does seem to be an issue in W3C with 
one company but that seems to be due to internal politics.
 
The only obligation that arises out of the OASIS system is that if you have IPR 
that you know to cover implementation of a specification you have to declare 
it. 
 
I know that there are companies with vast stockpiles of IPR that they think 
they will be unable to sort through. But as with the pearl in the junk room: if 
you don't know you have it you might was well throw it out anyway. If the 
lawyers don't know what the IPR portfolio contains and what it applies then how 
are you going to make money from it? The days when people looked at patents to 
find out if their invention might infringe and alert the owner are long gone, 
if the owner can't work out the applicability then why would anyone else?
 
If folk can't get their act together when a WG starts then why should we expect 
them to be able to do so at the end when we are trying to close the work?



From: Brian E Carpenter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thu 18/10/2007 5:30 PM
To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Cc: Simon Josefsson; Tim Polk; ietf@ietf.org
Subject: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call: 
draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]



On 2007-10-19 05:47, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
...
> What I would suggest is that new working groups be required to specify the 
> governing IPR rules in their charter, these would be either that all IPR must 
> be offered according to an open grant on W3C terms or that the working group 
> specifies at the outset that RAND terms are acceptable.

Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori processes
kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies, and generally
inhibit free discussion of initial ideas. Although it's messier to
confront patent issues later in the process, I believe that is
much better than constraining participation at the beginning.

 Brian


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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Dave Crocker]

Scott Brim wrote:

On 19 Oct 2007 at 10:30 +1300, Brian E Carpenter allegedly wrote:

On 2007-10-19 05:47, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

What I would suggest is that new working groups be required to
specify the governing IPR rules in their charter

...

Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori
processes kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies,

...


+1

Otherwise you get into battles over theory and ideology without any of
the information you need to make a decision.  



+1

--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Simon Josefsson]

Paul Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> At 4:10 PM -0700 10/18/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
>>Isn't it preferable to get into early battles over IP rules--and make sure
>>those rules are clear to WG participants--before we have wasted our time and
>>resources developing specifications that half the world (or more) can't
>>implement?
>
> I don't know which of the IETF WGs you have been involved with, but
> that hasn't been the case for any of the ones I have dealt with. Could
> you give an example of an WG in which this would have been preferable?

The DNSEXT WG is a good example where patented technology has been
presented and time has been spent on discussing what to do with it.
Some time later the working group drafted a requirements document (RFC
4986) which contained the following requirement '5.2.  No Known
Intellectual Property Encumbrance'.

The inclination to standardize only non-patented technology in DNSEXT is
fairly strong.  If the WG had made the policy explicit early on, the
discussions related to the patented ideas could have been more easily
dismissed.  Time could be spent on more productive work.

I think there are other examples, e.g., SRP in SASL WG.

>>Has anyone ever suggested that we inhibit "free discussion of initial
>>ideas"? Please don't raise silly arguments like that.
>
> It is not a silly argument. Yes, there are a few engineers in the IETF
> who like to play armchair lawyer and would love to spend the initial
> time of WG formation pontificating about IPR, but they are in the
> small minority. Such a discussion would be of no interest to the folks
> who want to do good technical work.

In today's world you can't do good technical work on a commercial basis
without considering patents.

/Simon

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Paul Hoffman]

At 4:10 PM -0700 10/18/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote:

Isn't it preferable to get into early battles over IP rules--and make sure
those rules are clear to WG participants--before we have wasted our time and
resources developing specifications that half the world (or more) can't
implement?


I don't know which of the IETF WGs you have been involved with, but 
that hasn't been the case for any of the ones I have dealt with. 
Could you give an example of an WG in which this would have been 
preferable? My experience has been that IPR issues are much, much 
more common for work that appears later in a WG's deliverables, not 
in the initial work.



Has anyone ever suggested that we inhibit "free discussion of initial
ideas"? Please don't raise silly arguments like that.


It is not a silly argument. Yes, there are a few engineers in the 
IETF who like to play armchair lawyer and would love to spend the 
initial time of WG formation pontificating about IPR, but they are in 
the small minority. Such a discussion would be of no interest to the 
folks who want to do good technical work.



Among the most
exciting discussions of ideas are those that come from having to design
around a patent that isn't available for free.


Your view of excitement might differ from the large majority of active IETFers.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2007-10-19 12:10, Lawrence Rosen wrote:

[I stripped cc's from this reply]

Brian Carpenter wrote:

Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori
processes kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies, and
generally inhibit free discussion of initial ideas. Although it's
messier to confront patent issues later in the process, I believe
that is much better than constraining participation at the
beginning.
 
Scott Brim responded: 

+1
Otherwise you get into battles over theory and ideology without any of
the information you need to make a decision.  You will still be able
to take your stance once the technical tradeoffs are worked out.



Strong -1 to Brian's and Scott's comments.

Isn't it preferable to get into early battles over IP rules--and make sure
those rules are clear to WG participants--before we have wasted our time and
resources developing specifications that half the world (or more) can't
implement?

Has anyone ever suggested that we inhibit "free discussion of initial
ideas"? 


If you work for a large company with a managed approach to
innovation and IPR handling, you simply aren't allowed
to discuss freely in an SDO unless the SDO's IPR regime
has been approved by the company. If you have a different
IPR regime for every WG, the stage that in the current IETF
is a wide and open discussion (including a BOF), when
innovative ideas are put on the table, would be replaced
by a careful dance among elephants about hypothetical IPR
covering hypothetical technology. That does indeed inhibit
free discussion of technical ideas.

I don't think we want that, which is why I believe the
IETF's IPR regime is just fine as it is.

Brian


Please don't raise silly arguments like that. Among the most
exciting discussions of ideas are those that come from having to design
around a patent that isn't available for free.

/Larry Rosen



-Original Message-
From: Scott Brim [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 3:12 PM
To: Brian E Carpenter
Cc: Simon Josefsson; ietf@ietf.org; Tim Polk
Subject: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-
authz-extns]

On 19 Oct 2007 at 10:30 +1300, Brian E Carpenter allegedly wrote:

On 2007-10-19 05:47, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

What I would suggest is that new working groups be required to
specify the governing IPR rules in their charter, these would be
either that all IPR must be offered according to an open grant on
W3C terms or that the working group specifies at the outset that
RAND terms are acceptable.

Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori
processes kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies, and
generally inhibit free discussion of initial ideas. Although it's
messier to confront patent issues later in the process, I believe
that is much better than constraining participation at the
beginning.

+1

Otherwise you get into battles over theory and ideology without any of
the information you need to make a decision.  You will still be able
to take your stance once the technical tradeoffs are worked out.

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RE: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Lawrence Rosen]

[I stripped cc's from this reply]

Brian Carpenter wrote:
> > Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori
> > processes kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies, and
> > generally inhibit free discussion of initial ideas. Although it's
> > messier to confront patent issues later in the process, I believe
> > that is much better than constraining participation at the
> > beginning.
 
Scott Brim responded: 
> +1
> Otherwise you get into battles over theory and ideology without any of
> the information you need to make a decision.  You will still be able
> to take your stance once the technical tradeoffs are worked out.
>

Strong -1 to Brian's and Scott's comments.

Isn't it preferable to get into early battles over IP rules--and make sure
those rules are clear to WG participants--before we have wasted our time and
resources developing specifications that half the world (or more) can't
implement?

Has anyone ever suggested that we inhibit "free discussion of initial
ideas"? Please don't raise silly arguments like that. Among the most
exciting discussions of ideas are those that come from having to design
around a patent that isn't available for free.

/Larry Rosen


> -Original Message-
> From: Scott Brim [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 3:12 PM
> To: Brian E Carpenter
> Cc: Simon Josefsson; ietf@ietf.org; Tim Polk
> Subject: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call:draft-housley-tls-
> authz-extns]
> 
> On 19 Oct 2007 at 10:30 +1300, Brian E Carpenter allegedly wrote:
> > On 2007-10-19 05:47, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> > > What I would suggest is that new working groups be required to
> > > specify the governing IPR rules in their charter, these would be
> > > either that all IPR must be offered according to an open grant on
> > > W3C terms or that the working group specifies at the outset that
> > > RAND terms are acceptable.
> >
> > Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori
> > processes kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies, and
> > generally inhibit free discussion of initial ideas. Although it's
> > messier to confront patent issues later in the process, I believe
> > that is much better than constraining participation at the
> > beginning.
> 
> +1
> 
> Otherwise you get into battles over theory and ideology without any of
> the information you need to make a decision.  You will still be able
> to take your stance once the technical tradeoffs are worked out.
> 
> ___
> Ietf mailing list
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> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf


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A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Scott Brim]

On 19 Oct 2007 at 10:30 +1300, Brian E Carpenter allegedly wrote:
> On 2007-10-19 05:47, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> > What I would suggest is that new working groups be required to
> > specify the governing IPR rules in their charter, these would be
> > either that all IPR must be offered according to an open grant on
> > W3C terms or that the working group specifies at the outset that
> > RAND terms are acceptable.
> 
> Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori
> processes kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies, and
> generally inhibit free discussion of initial ideas. Although it's
> messier to confront patent issues later in the process, I believe
> that is much better than constraining participation at the
> beginning.

+1

Otherwise you get into battles over theory and ideology without any of
the information you need to make a decision.  You will still be able
to take your stance once the technical tradeoffs are worked out.

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A priori IPR choices [Re: Third Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 2007-10-19 05:47, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
...

What I would suggest is that new working groups be required to specify the 
governing IPR rules in their charter, these would be either that all IPR must 
be offered according to an open grant on W3C terms or that the working group 
specifies at the outset that RAND terms are acceptable.


Violent disagreement. That would make all kinds of a priori processes
kick in for employees of patent-conscious companies, and generally
inhibit free discussion of initial ideas. Although it's messier to
confront patent issues later in the process, I believe that is
much better than constraining participation at the beginning.

Brian

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