Dave Crocker <dhc2(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net>:
1. Nothing about the reorganization is going to make IETF
standards be more useful or be produced significantly more
quickly. Hence, reorganization has nothing to do with the really
serious threats to IETF long-term survival.
Indeed it does not. I've been lurking on this list for a couple of
months now, and I am fighting an increasing feeling that I am watching
deck chairs being rearranged on the Titanic.
In the last 60 days, the IETF has taken the worst blow to its
credibility that I have observed in the entire history of the
organization. I refer, of course, to the Sender-ID debacle, which
exposed IETF's inability or unwillingness to defend Internet
standards against patent predation even when the existence of
prior art is readily establishable.
Here is what I had to say to Yakov Shafranovich on 7 September:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I believe the IETF's stated policy of passivity in the face of IPR
power grabs damages the IETF first and foremost. The whole point of
having standards organizations is that they coordinate multiple
competing interests to create a neutral commons that grows a market
faster. No standards organization can long remain relevant if the net
effect of its activities is not to do this but rather to rubber-stamp
proprietary control, creating monopolies in slower-growing
markets rather than commons in faster-growing ones.
In times past, simply ignoring the more outrageous claims may have
been enough of a response. I don't think it is today. Conditions
have changed. Post-DMCA and with the USPTO interpreting the scope of
patents ever more liberally, IPR law has more teeth than it used to
and the perceived risk attached to ignoring IPR claims has escalated.
Accordingly, any standards organization that wants to keep itself
relevant (e.g., useful to multiple competing interests) can no longer
merely describe a commons and piously hope nobody will fence off too big a
chunk. It has to assert and actively defend that commons, signaling
that no raids will be permitted there.
Note that nothing in the previous two paragraphs is open-source
ideology in any sense, just a straightforward discussion of signaling
behavior in markets. I think you'd be hard put to find any economist
that would disagree with it. The problems it raises are not unique
to IETF; other technical-standards organizations such as W3C, NIST,
and ISO are grappling with them as well.
I consider the IETF part of the open-source community. While I
certainly would not object if the rest of the open-source community's
agenda were to affect IETF policy, I think the most pressing reasons
for IETF to act are the effect of surrendering to IPR power grabs on
the IETF's own viability.
Accordingly, the question I think you should be asking is: can the
IETF long survive a policy of simply ignoring IPR claims in the hopes
they'll go away?
You'll have to judge for yourself, but I think the answer is "no".
As for the rest of the open-source community's position, I think that
has been made very clear by the open letters from ASF, Debian and
elsewhere. If IETF is not prepared to actively assert and defend a
commons, then we have no choice but to write off the IETF as part of
the problem rather than part of the solution and do the IETF's
signaling job ourselves.
Those responses were all about "no raids will be permitted here".
That is what they *mean*, and IETF's authority took a bad hit from the
fact that they had to be issued at all. I think it would be in
everyone's interest for the IETF's standing not to be further eroded,
and I think the authors of the open letters would agree. But for that
good result to obtain, the IETF has got to get off its butt and take
back the job of defending the commons. The *whole* job, including
rejecting RAND terms and proprietary licensing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A month later, my assessment of the political damage the Sender-ID
mess has done to IETF has only gone up. You are on a fast road to
irrelevance, gentlemen. You'd best be thinking about how to change
*that* rather than conducting meaningless exercises in rearranging
your bureaucracy.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
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