>> and if one solution is 120% better technically than another, but >> has a RAND license associated with it? What if it's 170% better? > > Marshall Rose wrote: > working groups make trade-offs all the time between simplicity, > functionality, and so on. licensing is another cost. given the amount > of traffic on this topic, it appears that licensing is a very heavy > cost. this may provide an answer to your question... > Unfortunately, while we can compare proposals based on their complexity, maybe even performance or overhead, there is, in reality, usually no way to compare the actual licensing costs at the time a decision is made. At least as far as I know, none of the non-free licensing statements on the IETF web site contain any information on these terms, beyond vague generalities. "Reasonable" is hardly a term with engineering precision.