On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:24:02PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
Ted, jumping ahead a little bit, how much of your concern would
be eliminated if that entry in the template said "Royalty Free
and RAND" (or "RAND and Royalty Free"), rather than just RF? I
agree that "RF and totally unreasonable" is a possible case, but
am trying to understand whether we have a disconnect about the
language we have used or about some general and important
principle?
I believe that this is the minimum we should have just simply to
protect the needs of commercial/propietary consumers of our standards,
so yes, that addresses much of my concern.
I believe it would be better if "Royalty Free" were more strictly
defined to include irrevocability *AND* either (a) the ability to
sublicense or (b) the ability for end-users to automatically get a
grant of permission without having to perform any explicit action, as
was done in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. Unlike some OSS
advocates, I don't feel a particular need to to require a patent
license which is valid for any field of endeavor; just the essential
claims necessary to implement an IETF standard is IMHO sufficient
(realistically I doubt many IPR holders would be willing grant more
than that). And I suspect there is general consensus that terms which
revoke permission in case of patent litgation (even the GPLv3 has such
terms) is not controversial at all.
But regardless of what definition we end up, I think we should more
explicitly define what we mean by Royalty Free, just to prevent
companies from engaging in PR/Marketing games. If it ends up being a
definition which means that it might not necessarily be useful to OSS
implementors (i.e., the end-user must in apply in person at the
offices of MegaCorp in Nome, Alaska example), at least it's well
defined and people are put on notice that they can't trust the IETF
when we say something is Royalty Free that the specification could be
really implemented by Open Source Software developers without doing
more digging into the details of the license --- which might not be in
the IPR disclosure. It's not ideal, but at least people would know
where they stand.
- Ted
Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed in this message are my own and does
not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer. I'm not
important enough to affect the opinions of my employer. :-)
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