RE: Ah, I see the cause of the situation now... (tls-authz situation)

["Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker at verisign.com>]

Title: Re: Ah, I see the cause of the situation now... (tls-authz situation)

I think Melinda makes a good point here.

 

The fundamental problem with these RMS-grams is that RMS has a longstanding habit of working in write only mode. He makes little or often no effort to determine what the situation is. I have in the past found him entirely interested in responding to enquires as to the purpose of his campaigns.

 

RMS has a certain number of supporters who are willing to write letters. That does not mean that RMS's opinion should hold greater weight than that of other people.

 

As I have argued in the past, the IETF should have an IPR policy precisely because of this type of situation. I do not see why there should be a need to reopen this debate every single time RMS wants to reopen it.

 

I suggest that we first eliminate from consideration all the submissions which make no reference to the specific TLS-Authz document in question. In other words, the one liners of the form 'standards should not have patents' without making any reference to this specific document all go in the bit bucket. If on the other hand it is of the form 'we at the FSF have an implementation that a lot of people use...' then that is different

 

---

From: ietf-bounces at ietf.org on behalf of Melinda Shore
Sent: Tue 2/10/2009 4:29 PM
To: Alex Loret de Mola; Ole Jacobsen
Cc: ietf at ietf.org
Subject: Re: Ah, I see the cause of the situation now... (tls-authz situation)

On 2/10/09 4:12 PM, "Alex Loret de Mola" <edgarverona at gmail.com> wrote:
> It assumes that I feel that the individuals posting here were
> clueless.

*I* feel that the individuals posting here were
largely clueless.  What, the "Reject TLS!" post
didn't raise your eyebrows?

I think the problem here is that the FSF issued
an action alert that contained an awful lot of
misinformation, and its minions did what they were
asked - they posted an "opinion" of a document they
clearly hadn't read.

This was an effort by another organization to get a
large number of IETF nonparticipants to send email
to the IETF.  I understand that we want to encourage
people to be interested in our documents and let
us know what they think but for heaven's sake they
deserve to be dismissed out-of-hand if they haven't
even bothered to read the thing for which they're
trying to block publication.

Melinda

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