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RE: Previous consensus on not changing patent policy (Re: References to Redphone's "patent")

2009-02-16 18:21:08
At 2:11 PM -0800 2/16/09, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
Let's forget the past; I acknowledge we lost that argument then among those
few who bothered to hum.

Many of us have heard this in various technical working groups when people who 
didn't get their way come back later. Such reconsiderations, particularly on 
topics of a non-protocol nature, are rarely embraced. We are humans with 
limited time and energy and focus.

But are the 1,000 or so emails in recent days from the FSF campaign not a
loud enough hum to recognize that our IPR policy is out of tune?

No, it is a statement that a group of people who are not active in the IETF 
want us to spend our time and effort to fix a problem they feel that they have.

This is not
the first such open source campaign either. IETF needs a more sturdy process
to deal with IPR issues. Please consider the suggestions now on the table.

Where? I see no Internet Draft, nor any significant group of people who have 
said they are willing to work on the problem. Seriously, if this is a 
significant issue for this motivated group of people, they can do some research 
and write one (or probably more) Internet Drafts.

The IETF has never been swayed by blitzes of a mailing list asking for us to do 
someone else's technical work; we should not be swayed by similar blitzes 
asking us to do their policy work. We are, however, amazingly (and sometime 
painfully) open to discussing worked-out solutions of either a technical or 
policy nature. In this case, "worked-out" means a document that describes the 
the current solution, the advantages and disadvantages of it, a proposal for a 
new solution, and a transition plan.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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