--On Friday, 30 March, 2007 10:12 -0700 Paul Hoffman
<paul(_dot_)hoffman(_at_)vpnc(_dot_)org> wrote:
At 11:50 AM -0500 3/29/07, Mark Brown wrote:
I have experienced some surprises when mixing law and
Internet standards. To try to avoid surprises, I have hired
IPR attorneys at two different firms to review my draft which
proposes a royalty-free license grant. I expect any
resulting license will be conditioned upon IETF acceptance of
TLS authz as a standard. I hope to have concluded these
services next week.
You may feel that this is an offer, but it is in fact a form
of bargaining. "If you put this on standards track, then we
will (or might) give a royalty-free license". That is a poor
bargain for the IETF, and the IETF should not consider the
offer when it decides whether or not to make the protocol a
standard.
This protocol extension does not seem significant enough for
the IETF to be making bargains, particularly when the IPR
holder has not shown good faith in the past about being
up-front about what they know. A reasonable way forward would
be to simply publish it as an Informational RFC as if it had
been brought to the RFC Editor as an individual submission.
For whatever it is worth, I think we need to step carefully
around the distinction Paul makes above: there are almost
certainly circumstances in which we should accept a broader
grant of rights conditional on standardization and a narrower
one if the technology is not standardized. I wish the IPR WG
were paying a bit more attention to this sort of issue.
However, in this particular case, I tend to agree with Paul.
While I'd be happy to hear the opinion of the TLS WG on the
subject, I don't think the case has yet been made that these
extensions are sufficiently important that the IETF should
standardize an encumbered technology --or engage in a
negotiation about those encumbrances, especially with parties
who appear to have been less forthcoming in the past than our
rules require.
I also do not believe that it is appropriate to view
Informational publication as some sort of consolation prize.
If the community, and the IESG, conclude that the document and
its technology should be standardized, then Informational
publication should not be automatic: the document should be
reviewed for sponsorship appropriateness according the IESG's
recently-published procedures or actually handed off to the RFC
Editor as an independent submission.
john
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf