Larry Rosen,
It is indicative of your letter's content that the introduction
informs us that the IETF is the SDO responsible for Ethernet
and WiFi (well, they both start with IE don't they?).
Getting down to the letter itself.
IETF, the most democratic and open of standards organizations,
is proposing a contribution policy that, simply put, may result in
standards
that are not truly open for implementation and use in open source
software.
This draft formal policy ... expressly omits any patent licenses.
Do you expect us to issue an RFC stating that anyone who submits an ID
automatically grants a world-wide royalty-free license to use the
described technology ?
I doubt that this is a reasonable expectation.
Many IETF participants do not have the authority to grant such license
terms,
and even were all authors to grant such licenses,
I assume that you realize that their may be other parties
holding IPR rights who have not participated.
So I guess you furthermore expect anyone who submits an ID
to indemnify eveyone with regards to third party IPR rights?
These issues have been around for years,
and the reasonable path, taken by the IETF, ITU and most other SDOs
is to require participants to disclose their IPR,
and to encourage them to disclose any IPR about which they know.
Y(J)S
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