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Re: IPR Questions Raised by Sam Hartman at the IETF 73 Plenary

2008-12-17 16:34:38


Fred Baker wrote:
Silly question. Is this discussion more appropriate to ietf-ipr?

Not any more.

It was. But the result is what a number of different folk who are serious, long-term IETF contributors consider the current situation to be a basic crisis that prevents working on some existing docs.

That's pretty serious, Fred, and most certainly not something that should simply be referred back to the relevant working group, with instructions to fix things.


One could argue that ietf-ipr looked at this question for two years prior to submitting the new boilerplate, and by missing it made it clear that they weren't adequate to review. That said, there was also an IETF last call, and none of us detected the issue until Sam brought it up.

This is at least the second time someone has tried to invoke the "well, it went through IETF Last Call" as some sort of presumably meaningful, reference, presumably with respect to shared blame or shared understanding or share something.

We really need to stop making those observations, since they have nothing to do with fixing the current problem, except to warn us that whatever we did before didn't work adequately, in spite of extensive, diligent effort.


But really - isn't this about IPR?

Fred, when a team produces diligent effort and a failed product, is the usual management response to simply ask them to try again? That's not what I'm used to seeing in the real world and I'll bet it is not what anyone who work for a successful company is used to, either. Especially when the effort was by folks working outside of their area of expertise.

Whatever it is that produced the current situation, we should try to avoid repeating it.

d/

--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net
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