On Fri, 15 Oct 2004, Paul Vixie wrote:
... notwithstanding, how can a specification be considered a standard
if over half of the operators on the planet refuse to deploy it
because of patent/licence issues.
i can't understand why this matters.
this matters as concerns the defacto sphere of influence and acceptance of
the ietf as the authoritative body regarding how the internet works. both
groups, the ietf and the open-source/free software community, are working
towards the same goal, with similar methodologies. from experience, it
seems this simple: if you want widespread use of a technology, you give
it away, and tell people how it works. this is essentially what has
happened with everything the ietf has ever produced, and hence the
exponential growth rate of said technology. you will see a similar trend
with the growth of open source. and don't forget that both groups arose
from similar sets of people, who were, in effect, doing everything they
could to figure out how to make things work. if what is created in such
openness of process is spoiled by one guy saying to the rest of us "i know
how it works, cause i made it, and you must pay, and you still cannot know
how it works" then the whole process has failed.
if ietf were to change its policies
so that only "open technology" was allowed in the standards,
could you cite some examples of closed technology in the standards having
success in the real world?
there would
still be patent fights (both from submarines and ships-in-the-night).
that sounds like a poem.
since the majority of those within the sound of my voice were not party to
the RSA-vs-DSA wars which characterized the early years of DNSSEC, i've
made a small archive available on the web. you should really look at it,
especially the note from steve kent (then Security AD). it's in "digest"
format rather than "mime" format at <http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/rsa-wars.txt>.
it seems to me steve was trying to move around patent/royalty encumerances
by using other technologies.
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