On Jul 26, 2004, at 5:12 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
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.
The IETF is not a policy-making body nor a political party. If it
were, its technical work would be held as partisan and in far less
regard. So politics have little to do with the IETF.
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.
The NSEC issue is a case of ignoring requirements not making policy or
political statements. There is a large difference between saying "it
is a requirement of MARID to adopt license X" vs. "Microsoft is using
MARID to stop all free software the world over."
-andy