On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, Dean Anderson wrote:
This is a personal message, and doesn't qualify as being published. You
mentioned that you failed to follow up. That may be true. And that's why
you shouldn't be credited for originating the idea, and why David Green
and later Hadmut Danisch should be credited. They did the work, and
unlike you, took it to the IETF, and published it first. What you did in
secret is irrelevant. You should have published it.
That's just your oversight. However, the Namedroppers archives show that
you __replied__ to Green's proposal. He was __first__ to publish. Maybe
you had Miller's draft in the wings since 1997. But you didn't get it it
first.
To be able to claim that somebody first discovered it, the person would
have to either file a patent (and have patent filing date prior to when
the idea is first discussed on introduced in public) or to actually post
an idea in public forum (either internet or journal, etc). So I hate to
say it, but it looks like Dean Anderson is right and based on the facts
presented David Green should be credited as first person that introduced
what is now being developed by MARID.
I recommend MARID chairs or authors of the drafts make an appropriate
changes to the Acknoledgement section of both core and protocol drafts,
something like this (text mostly combination of what was in protocol
and core acknoledgements sections):
This design is based on earlier work published in 2003 in [RMX] and
[DMP] drafts (by Hadmut Danisch and Gordon Fecyk respectively).
The idea of using a DNS record to check the legitimacy of an email
address traces its ancestry to "Repudiating Mail-From" draft by Paul
Vixie [Vixie] (based on suggestion by Jim Miller) and to
"Domain-Authorized SMTP Mail" draft by David Green [Green] who first
introduced this idea on namedroppes maillist in 2002.
With references as follows:
[Green] http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/namedroppers/msg01636.html
[Vixie] http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/namedroppers/msg01638.html
And these acknolidgements should probably be the same for both
marid-protocol and marid-core drafts. Although protocol can list
additional people who contributed to design of SPF while marid-core
may list those who contributed to caller-id.
P.S. While the original thread started was more general question on
"How IETF treats contributors", this has now become a discussion that
is very particular to MARID WG documents. I think it might be appropriate
that those wishing to participate and discuss futher what acknolidgement
section of MARID drafts should say, should do it on MARID mail list,
rather then on IETF general list, especially since only discussions there
would count and we are already on the last week of "Last Call" on these
drafts. Please see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/marid-charter.html
for information on how to participate in this WG to discuss these documents.
I also would like to urge other IETF participants to look at some of the
latest archives as we're discussing number of problems with these drafts
and its important for WG chairs to hear from wide audience as to if we
should proceed considering how many problems have been found already.
Of great importance are also issues due to IPR claimed by Microsoft for
something that many on the list said is obvious derivitive from RFC2822.
Microsoft also provided license which is overly restrictive and would not
allow to support new protocol by any software that is licensed under GNU
or simular public source licenses and this has raised questions as to if
we should proceed futher with these drafts considering possibility that
protocol may not be adapted by large portion of internet community.
---
William Leibzon, Elan Networks:
mailto: william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net
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