RE: Withdrawal of Approval and Second Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns

[Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz at cmu.edu>]

On Friday, March 30, 2007 10:12:14 AM -0700 Paul Hoffman 
<paul.hoffman at vpnc.org> wrote:

> At 11:50 AM -0500 3/29/07, Mark Brown wrote:
> > I have experienced some surprises when mixing law and Internet standards.
> > To try to avoid surprises, I have hired IPR attorneys at two different
> > firms to review my draft which proposes a royalty-free license grant.  I
> > expect any resulting license will be conditioned upon IETF acceptance of
> > TLS authz as a standard.  I hope to have concluded these services next
> > week.
>
> You may feel that this is an offer, but it is in fact a form of
> bargaining. "If you put this on standards track, then we will (or might)
> give a royalty-free license". That is a poor bargain for the IETF, and
> the IETF should not consider the offer when it decides whether or not to
> make the protocol a standard.

I think there is a significant exception which may apply in this case.  If 
the IPR issues are the sole remaining factor in the IETF's decision as to 
whether to make a protocol a standard, then I think it is entirely 
reasonable for the IETF to consider an offer which would eliminate or at 
least mitigate those issues if the protocol were to become a standard.  I 
see nothing wrong with saying "I'm willing to grant a reasonable license if 
my technology becomes a standard, but reserve the right to make money 
otherwise", as long as the IETF does not allow such an offer to result in 
adoption as a standard of something it would not have standardized 
otherwise.

As for informational vs an independent submission, I think there is a 
factor to be considered.  It seems to me that an informational IETF 
document is a fine way to say "this is a good idea, and we think this is 
the right way to do FOO, but we can't actually recommend it (for whatever 
reason)".  For example, we have at least one document that defines the use 
of elliptic curve cryptography with one of our protocols, which is 
informational because the working group that produced it didn't feel they 
could recommend it as a standard due to the hairy IPR issues surrounding 
that technology.

-- Jeff

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