On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 11:13:24PM -0500, Dave Crocker wrote: > To underscore the point that Marshall has been making: > > The IETF has a strong preference to use unencumbered technologies. When > there is a choice between encumbered and unencumbered, the working group > includes encumbrance into the range of factors it treats as important for > evaluating alternatives. > > There are some unknowns about licensing. Some holders of IPR are helpful > to resolving that easily and quickly. Others are more reticent. That > become a component of the evaluation about the IPR factor. > > And so on. > > Generally this thread seems to be seeking determinacy for a matter that can > only be made deterministic by a) ignoring IPR encumbrance, or b) rejecting > all IPR encumbrances. The first is not compatible with IETF culture. The > latter is not practical in some cases. > > So, what exactly do folks think is a practical kind of change to the > current IETF policies? I think the problem is that while there is (very) rough consensus IETF-wide that there is a strong cultural bias against patent encumberances (*), this bias is not adequately documented in writing. This is exacerbated by the fact that some IETF working groups, particularly those where a greater number of the participants do not have as much IETF experience and acculturation. This is happening more and more as we start doing more cross-collaborations with other standards bodies, and when technologies which previously had been used on top of other media are "ported" to IP, and people who had been used to working in other standards bodies find them selves working within the IETF. (*) Unless there is a ***very*** reason why you can't do without the patent --- RSA signatures/encryption being classic example, but even there, RSA DSI's licensing policies were probably far more effective that the U.S. government's export control regime at preventing the deployment of secure protocols in the Internet). Many of these newcomers to the IETF very dutifully read the relevant RFC's (2026, et. al.), and then are surprised either (a) they get strong push back from the IESG, or (b) their decisions get attacked at IETF plenery sessions, the IETF mailing list, or in other venues. They are get surprised, and there is some fairness to their argument that this bias against non-RF patents isn't written down anywhere and isn't formally part of our policies. Granted, we can't document every tiny detail of cultural biases within the IETF in our policy documents, but I think this one is important enough that we need to say something. Once we do decide that we need to say something, then the next question is exactly where do we draw the line, and that's where all of the discussion and long missives to the IETF mailing list are coming from. Although it's pretty clear we won't be able to give working groups an algorithmic flowchart about when a non-RF patent is acceptable, I do believe that we can give some general guidelines, and then require that the working group chair work with the area director when this sort of issue raises its ugly head. This won't solve the "stealth patent" problem, where the patent problems only reveal themselves very late in the process, or even after document is published as an RFC, but it does handle a large number of other cases. - Ted