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

[Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman at vpnc.org>]

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