As a personal political view, I happen to be opposed to the notion of
software patents. But I still think that the document in question should
be published as Experimental:
- It's quite plain that this political view has never been adopted by IETF
consensus. (I also think it plain that it has no chance of being adopted
by IETF consensus.)
- I don't think the IETF considers "this document offends my political point
of view" to be a legitimate reason for opposing the document. The degree
of passion and/or repetition with which the political view is expressed is
irrelevant. (The suppression of a document for political reasons is
frequently called "censorship", even if other avenues of publication still
exist.)
- It's really within the province of each WG to determine whether its
standards are implementable by whoever needs to implement them in order
for the standard to be successful. This may or may not include open
source implementations.
- If a particular proposal is technically sound, but not adopted because the
WG thinks that its patent encumbrances are a bar to implementation, then
it is perfectly valid to publish the proposal as a non-standard track
RFC. The only real criterion is that the technical content be interesting
or otherwise worth preserving.
With regard to the coordinated letter writing attack being waged on this
list, well, we're all familiar with the situation in which folks try to get
their way by getting lots of non-participants to send scripted messages.
Often you can tell that the message writers don't even know what the issues
are, but at least most of the letter writing campaigns pretend to be about
technical issues; the current campaign doesn't even bother with the
pretense!
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