Hi,
<<snip>>
John C Klensin wrote:
Certainly individuals sensitive to the needs and concerns of
such a company should vigorously oppose any WG action that would
develop a standard whose provisions require practicing a patent
for which there are no assurances that licenses will be
available.
If the owners of private patents want to play with other
companies in private arenas for private standards, that's fine
with me. But that is not what I see as IETF's mission, or
rather it is not part of any mission I consider important for
free and open source software.
Leaving these matters, as you recommend, to the whims and
wishes of individual IETF working groups and later licenses
TBD isn't a solution for anyone. Decide now that the IETF is a
form of public trust and not just an engineer's playground*,
and act accordingly.
Assuming that the decisions of those WGs are "whims" is either
more hyperbole or deeply insulting to the people who participate
in them. What I've seen in the IETF, in practice, is a
significant distaste for encumbered technologies coupled with a
willingness to face reality when something sufficiently
important cannot be standardized without dependence on something
encumbered. The Public Key Crypto issue mentioned earlier stands
out as an example and I believe that we made the right decision,
rather than ignoring the issues and waiting for all of the
relevant patents to expire (which appeared to be the only other
choice). You may disagree, of course.
If the IETF has in practice has a distaste for encumbered technologies
(fair thinking), coupled with the local power of being applied for a
patented piece of code, this issue becomes a local affair - no bearing
on the other parts of the world wrt the status of the policy's
ambiguity..
what is the number of patented codes which has not been given a license
as part of a RFC to be used / imported in(to) the americas for
development of systems by competitors?
If that is a big number, that would have raised a series of other
issues which in turn must have left a bad taste leading to the sorting
out of the ambiguity in the policy. but has that occured? - i am not
aware.
The issue raises when there is a serious shift towards having software
patents being introduced in all parts of the world, which i am afraid
cannot happen in the near / distant future.
Thanks and Regards
Mukundan
* Forgive me, my engineer friends, for this bit of hyperbole.
And forgive us, including those of us who are not engineers, for
resisting having the IETF turn into a playground for lawyers who
want us to adopt sweeping policy rules that would prevent us
from making finely-tuned decisions in the best interests of the
Internet.
john
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