Stephan Wenger wrote:
Please note that I didn't make a proposal. I can live quite well with a
misalignment of IETF terminology and reality as perceived outside the IETF.
So can the industry, I think. What I was commenting on is that it does not
make sense to me to re-iterate the mantra of "Experimental RFCs not being
standards", when there is ample evidence that a large percentage of the
outside world views this differently.
It seems to take only the intervention one of the (security / congestion
control / anti-patent / ...) communities of the IETF to move a document
intended for standard's track to the, arguably, second-class RFC status
known as "Experimental". Again, that's not a problem for me, for the reason
stated above.
Hi Stephan,
The "misalignment of IETF terminology and reality" continues to bother me. I
hope you don't expect the FOSS part of our software industry to live with
that misalignment just because big companies can afford to evaluate patent
risks in private.
Since we are talking about a specific patent disclosure here and not some
abstract terminology, then *experimental* status for draft-housley-tls-authz
makes not one tiny bit of legal difference. Patents deal with *use* and
don't care about the purpose. IETF contributors can write about TLS all we
want, and maybe even draft software to implement that proposed RFC, but the
moment we execute code on a computer we would potentially infringe.
Experiment or for actual commercial purposes, it would still be an
infringement. We could be liable potentially for years' worth of damages. We
could yet be faced with an injunction that would make our standardization
and implementation efforts utterly useless.
Isn't that the "reality"? If we use different terminology to identify this
IETF RFC, how does that change anything?
Not that we have any good reason to believe that the disclosed patent claims
will be issued for real; this is merely a patent application, and we're all
still speculating randomly about future risks.
Best regards,
/Larry
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