Scott Brim wrote:
Right - and when Engineers are presented with a technical problem to solve, and they 'negotiate and agree on a common technology description to meet that need' its called an technology initiative' not a work of Shakespeare.Excerpts from TSG on Mon, Mar 02, 2009 05:18:41AM -0800:Richard -Why should the IETF deny a standard to anyone who wanted to undertake the process to get one? My argument is that the IETF is community of members involved in standardizing network technologies and also the processes of that standardization.The process is one of _agreeing_ on standards, for the sake ofinteroperability.
That meeting produces Intellectual Property in the form of a physical description of a process for doing some specific set of functions with specific and well documented effects and consequences.And then implementing two test cases and running a barrage of validation steps to prove that they work properly and that the code works.
In the case of things like NTP it also includes the making available of the NTP reference image from ISC.NTP.ORG for instance.
Yeah - and it came from an argument in the main executive conference room at Borelund which Phillipe lost - those were good days in Scott's Valley... Personally I liked the Silicon Valley SW compliers a tad better but JBuilder was cool.I think it was Philippe Kahn who said "the nicething about standards is that there are so many to choose from".
There are implications about liability therein then. Also - you seem to think the IETF has a right to control what is and is not routed on the Internet - the IETF is a standards process - not a political lobby. Its supposed to be a fair process too and one would hope a transparent one as well That said Fair and Open has specific requirements - unless that term is being redefined as an IETF custom Term of Art - and then it needs to be formally defined.We don't want to go there and have had many battles to reduce the number of potential "standards".
Further the ISOC also is not a political lobby per their 501(c)(3) filing. So doing ANYTHING to effect changes in Law constitutes a direct violation of the charter issued to both ISOC and the IETF. If you want to ask why - each document published in defiance of the Patent Policy of the US Government arguably constitutes a political act, and if a majority of the operations of an entity are political in form, then their 501 status changes. Only in this case its ISOC's status which will change one would think...
That said - the IETF needs to come into immediate alignment with the idea that since it forces people to physically implement a representative implementation of any Initiative's vetting work product, and to formally interoperability-test it (what ever that means in the context of each individual initiative) against another independently implemented representative implementation of the IP in the proposed standard, that a formal license to produce the test implementations must be included. That license cannot discard patent controls.
The IETF does not produce fictional works or any other type of literary effort - it produces technical specifications based on a joint-engineering development process which it calls VETTING. That workproduct it then licenses to people to use to build things in the real world with. That said there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to separate the IETF's publishing of those specifications and their licensing for use beyond just reprinting.
Just my two cents. Todd