Dave Crocker <dhc2@xxxxxxxxxxxx>: > 1. Nothing about the reorganization is going to make IETF > standards be more useful or be produced significantly more > quickly. Hence, reorganization has nothing to do with the really > serious threats to IETF long-term survival. Indeed it does not. I've been lurking on this list for a couple of months now, and I am fighting an increasing feeling that I am watching deck chairs being rearranged on the Titanic. In the last 60 days, the IETF has taken the worst blow to its credibility that I have observed in the entire history of the organization. I refer, of course, to the Sender-ID debacle, which exposed IETF's inability or unwillingness to defend Internet standards against patent predation even when the existence of prior art is readily establishable. Here is what I had to say to Yakov Shafranovich on 7 September: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I believe the IETF's stated policy of passivity in the face of IPR power grabs damages the IETF first and foremost. The whole point of having standards organizations is that they coordinate multiple competing interests to create a neutral commons that grows a market faster. No standards organization can long remain relevant if the net effect of its activities is not to do this but rather to rubber-stamp proprietary control, creating monopolies in slower-growing markets rather than commons in faster-growing ones. In times past, simply ignoring the more outrageous claims may have been enough of a response. I don't think it is today. Conditions have changed. Post-DMCA and with the USPTO interpreting the scope of patents ever more liberally, IPR law has more teeth than it used to and the perceived risk attached to ignoring IPR claims has escalated. Accordingly, any standards organization that wants to keep itself relevant (e.g., useful to multiple competing interests) can no longer merely describe a commons and piously hope nobody will fence off too big a chunk. It has to assert and actively defend that commons, signaling that no raids will be permitted there. Note that nothing in the previous two paragraphs is open-source ideology in any sense, just a straightforward discussion of signaling behavior in markets. I think you'd be hard put to find any economist that would disagree with it. The problems it raises are not unique to IETF; other technical-standards organizations such as W3C, NIST, and ISO are grappling with them as well. I consider the IETF part of the open-source community. While I certainly would not object if the rest of the open-source community's agenda were to affect IETF policy, I think the most pressing reasons for IETF to act are the effect of surrendering to IPR power grabs on the IETF's own viability. Accordingly, the question I think you should be asking is: can the IETF long survive a policy of simply ignoring IPR claims in the hopes they'll go away? You'll have to judge for yourself, but I think the answer is "no". As for the rest of the open-source community's position, I think that has been made very clear by the open letters from ASF, Debian and elsewhere. If IETF is not prepared to actively assert and defend a commons, then we have no choice but to write off the IETF as part of the problem rather than part of the solution and do the IETF's signaling job ourselves. Those responses were all about "no raids will be permitted here". That is what they *mean*, and IETF's authority took a bad hit from the fact that they had to be issued at all. I think it would be in everyone's interest for the IETF's standing not to be further eroded, and I think the authors of the open letters would agree. But for that good result to obtain, the IETF has got to get off its butt and take back the job of defending the commons. The *whole* job, including rejecting RAND terms and proprietary licensing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A month later, my assessment of the political damage the Sender-ID mess has done to IETF has only gone up. You are on a fast road to irrelevance, gentlemen. You'd best be thinking about how to change *that* rather than conducting meaningless exercises in rearranging your bureaucracy. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf