GPL would not be a criterion I would consider reasonable. And in particular I
would not accept the idea that the IETF or any other body be committed to
whatever notions insert themselves into RMS in the future. I have actually met
RMS.
What I would like to do here is to arrive at a set of terms that is considered
to be sufficiently RANDZ to be sufficiently compatible with the consensus
amongst open source developers. At the moment I do not see a consensus in favor
of GPL 3.0.
Having seen a WG crash and burn after theological discussions over open source
license compatibility I would like to see an IETF level consensus that terms X
are sufficiently open for most purposes. If someone had a reason to beleive
that these were not sufficient in a specific working group for specific reasons
these could then be argued in the WG if there was a WG consensus that this was
necessary.
Contrawise if someone were to argue that there was a case that made it
necessary to accept RAND terms with a paid license this would also be an option
but one that I would expect to be the rare exception which is the reason I
started my example 'absent a compelling technical case'.
Most of the IPR that becomes troublesome was originally filed as defensive. I
am going to be filing a lot more patent applications in the future, the main
business case for doing so being to reduce (not eliminate) patent liability
exposure. I would like to have the licensing criteria established at the time
we make the application, not three times (on application, on starting work in
WG, on finalizing work in WG) with possibly different lawyers.
________________________________
From: Scott Kitterman [mailto:scott(_at_)kitterman(_dot_)com]
Sent: Wed 24/10/2007 11:33 AM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices
On Wednesday 24 October 2007 06:50, Norbert Bollow wrote:
Scott Kitterman <scott(_at_)kitterman(_dot_)com> wrote:
And that will never fly (IANAL) with the GPL and so here we sit at an
impasse again. So either a GPL implementation is important to
interoperability in a given space or it is not. If it is important to
interoperabilty, then this is a showstopper. If not, maybe not.
Do you have any specific example of an internet standard for which you
think that lack of GPL-compatible licensing of any (perhaps just
hypothetical) relevant patents would not cause interoperability serious
problems if the patent holder chose to aggressive enforce the terms of
that non-GPL-compatible patent license?
No. My point was that for the IETF, interoperability is the goal, not some
general statement about goodness of Free software. In many/most/maybe all
cases, this will require any IPR restrictions to be GPL compatible.
Scott K
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