At 08:04 PM 11/6/97 +0000, Ian Grigg wrote:
OK. A slight point of clarification: encumbered algorithms as a MUST
should not be permitted if there are alternatives, presumably. MAY or
SHOULD is ok?
Last we heard, MAY and SHOULD is OK. (I'm still lobbying against "MAY"
because that implies that everything not listed is "MAY NOT", and I think
that's a bad protocol.)
I wonder if IETF would take that to heart and insist
that if RSADSI were to give royalty-free license to S/MIME, they should
also give it to competitors?
Just to be very clear here, in my extensive dealings with RSA over S/MIME,
they have never suggested that they wanted to give a royalty-free license
to S/MIME developers. The might in the future, of course, but that' not
come up yet with me in private, and never in public.
On a related issue, that of an unencumbered reference implementation. I
have heard it said that this was required.
Not at all. To move from Proposed to Draft standard, we must prove that
there are two independent interoperable implementations of each required
feature. A "reference implementation" has never been required and is
certainly not available for most of the popular IETF protocols.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium