On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 07:08:06PM -0400,
Andrew Newton <andy(_at_)hxr(_dot_)us> wrote
a message of 25 lines which said:
We have asked repeatedly that this type of behavior be stopped.
Excuse me but it seems that legal or political issues should be openly
discussed *before* the standard is cast in stone. Otherwise, the fine
RFC writers would have work for nothing if the resulting technology is
so patent-encumbered that it cannot be implemented or distributed.
I've already seen that sort of behavior at IETF: dismissing in a few
sentences any legal or political issues because "we are a technical
body" and "we should not get involved in non-technical issues". Very
often, the dismissed issue just come back later and time and effort
were wasted. It happened with NSEC zone walking in DNSsec, for
instance, when the worries about invasion of privacy were not taking
into account, forcing the issue to pop up again during the last call.
So, because MARID records are useful only if *many* sites use them,
deciding in advance to be blind to patent issues is a bad
decision. And using personal remarks against the persons who happen to
raise these issues will not help, either.
[Woh, I managed not to mention Microsoft once :-)]