(Cross posting removed)
On 2007-10-24 22:56, Philippe Verdy wrote:
...
However, the FSF recognizes that, until now, the IETF was more strict about
the licensing conditions, rejecting proposals that included royalties-maker
licenses and explicit personal agreement between the licensor and the
licensees (under this scheme, if it was accepted, nothing would prevent a
licensor to start charging yearly royalties to each licensor for exercising
the patented rights.
In that case the FSF recognized wrong... the IETF has often approved standards
track documents with IPR disclosures setting RAND conditions.
On 2007-10-26 21:13, Norbert Bollow wrote:
...
The question is this: Is copyleft open source / free software so
unimportant with regard to any area of internet standards that it
would be justifiable to adopt any specification with fundamentally
incompatible patent situation as a standards-track RFC?
I believe that the answer to this question very clearly is no!
Norbert, you seem to miss the point that the IETF's criterion
for advancing documents along the standards track is *empirical*
(has interoperability been demonstrated in the real world?) and
emphatically not faith-based (do we *believe* that the standard is
good and the IPR issues unimportant?). The question at issue is
whether we should change the empirical criteria to explicitly include
the availability of at least one implementation that is both
interoperable and free.
On 2007-10-27 07:22, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
...
It is not a major change in principle. But it does have some practical changes.
When we chartered KEYPROV I was told that the IPR regime should not be in the
charter, this was not a concern to me there because all the proposals were OK
IPR wise. But I do want to have the option of the forcing function in the
charter as explained. This is standard in OASIS and in W3C there is only one
regime that the WGs can chose.
I think it really is an enormous change in principle, from
an empirical to a faith-based approach.
On 2007-10-27 08:06, SM wrote:
...
Patents do raise some concerns about interoperability in regards to open source/free software. From a technical point of view, there is nothing that prevents implementation if the specifications are available. But then, we are taking a narrowed view of interoperability.
Well, that's exactly the reason for the IETF's empirical approach;
we don't even need to consider IPR as a separate issue when testing
interoperability. The simple existence of interoperable implementations
tells us that IPR conditions must be reasonable. If we extend that to
include at least one free implementation, that tells us that IPR
conditions for free software must be reasonable. QED.
Brian
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