Sirs,
As a body upon whom the developers world-wide depend to provide
interoperable communications standards, I would strongly encourage the
IETF to endorse only open standards and to refuse proprietary standards
of any kind unless provided royalty-free and litigation-free by their
owners to the worldwide community in exchange for IETF endorsement.
Standards historically speaking have always meant conventions that could
be adopted freely without any cost or liability to facilitate exchange
of information, trade, scientific knowledge, etc. Think of standard
units of measure, e.g. kilograms, meters, and seconds for Science and
Trade; International Morse Code for communication; even Diplomatic
Protocols for communications between embassies and heads of state.
If a vendor wishes to become a de facto proprietary standard, let them
earn such status on their own in the marketplace by virtue of compelling
technical goodness; but reserve the more exalted "De jure" standards of
the IETF for those standards that in addition to technical merit also
support unencumbered use over proprietary privilege.
Sincerely,
Tom Bevington
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