Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx>: > We're not out to rid the world of patent-laden work, nor are we out to > make patent owners rich. The IETF exists to promulgate relevant and > correct standards to the Internet Community, and educate people on their > intended safe use. You'll talk yourself right into the dustbin of history with that line. I think that would be very sad, considering the IETF's contributions in times past. But it's where IETF seems to be headed now. Reality check: Apache has 68% market share. Open-source MTAs handle 85% of all email traffic. When Meng Weng Wong was thinking about how to evangelize SPF, his first instinct was to bypass IETF and go straight to the open-source MTA developers -- I had to lobby hard to persuade him to go through the RFC process, and now I wonder if I was right to do that. The ground under software standards organizations has been shifting; significant parts of the commons-creation function that once belonged to it have moved to open-source project groups like the ASF or xiph.org. Nowadays, what the Linux kernel hackers do matters a hell of a lot more to Unix standardization than anything the Austin Group emits. A big issue, in this kind of environment, is what traditional standards organizations have to do and be in order to retain any utility at all. Certainly it isn't the IETF's job to "rid the world of patent-laden work". But you'd better believe that it *is* the IETF's job to ensure that Internet standards are an open commons, implementable by anyone without fear they'll be raped and pillaged by hordes of attack lawyers. If you don't embrace that mission, you're soon going to find you have no mission left that some outfit like ASF or xiph.org or W3C isn't doing better. You've had two direct warnings about this -- the ASF and Debian open letters. They interpreted IETF's passivity on the Sender-ID patent issue as damage and routed around it. If the IETF doesn't get its act together, that *will* happen again. The open-source community and its allies will have no choice but to increasingly route around IETF, and IETF will become increasingly irrelevant. I do not want to see this happen. You shouldn't either. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf