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Please reject draft-housley-tls-authz-extns

2007-10-26 10:41:46


Hello,

I've only today become aware of a problem where, once again, a company
wants to sneak possibly patent-encumbered stuff into a standard that is
subsequently to be used in software around the world.

As you are most likely already aware of, there is no way for a broad
class of software to implement anything that is patent-encumbered, and
apart from the fact that this part in the software world has the
highest growth in the industry, a patent on anything will split the
software world into fractions that can adopt a patented standard, and
one that can't.

So, first, I'd like to thank you for rejecting the standard proper
while it included this extension.



But since standardization often takes much longer than the market is
willing to wait, a significant part of today's operations, especially
in the fast-paced Internet area where such a standard would most likely
have to be employed, a draft will be implemented, too, simply to fill
the gap. For this reason, publishing the function in question in the
draft will also create large damage because there'll be a significant
number of players to adopt this functionality, expecting it to become a
part of the standard proper in the next revision of it, and in the hope
to gain a competitive edge. And once it's implemented, there's a number
of stakeholders who will weight in to make sure that the questionable
function actually *will* be promoted to be part of the proper standard.
A few years ago, a representative from a networking company (maybe
Cisco) explained it exactly that way, that not adopting current
practise in a standard means possibly high financial losses to the
player who bet on it early. I don't know if or how you are liable to
such users, but in case you are, there'll be no chance to remove it,
ever, once it has entered any piece of paper, be it a "draft" or not.

So, in conclusion, I hope that you don't approve of this function in
any of your publications and reject it in the draft, too.



Side note:

Please make it a mandatory policy that anyone that proposes anything to
be encoded into a standard, will automatically say that there'll be no
patent claims pertaining to their proposal. Ie, if a company proposes
functionality X and has a patent on it, then a license for that patent
will automatically be granted to everyone, for every kind of use,
irrevocably, perpetually, and royalty-free.

And if company X proposes something and comany Y has a patent on it,
there should be a way to give them a realistic option to voice any
concerns before the standard is passed, but once it's passed, no patent
claim will pertain to anything arising out of the use of the standard
(eg. a future "JPEG patent" will automatically become effectively void
after the standard is passed), like in a marriage ceremony: "Who has
objections to this marriage, should raise his voice now, or be silent
forever."


Thank you for listening.


Kind Regards,

Toni Mueller.

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Oeko.neT Mueller & Brandt GbR                   sales: info(_at_)oeko(_dot_)net
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A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion.
Q. Why is top posting bad?

$ echo "creationism" | tr -d "holy godly goal"


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