Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > If it was possible to set up things in such a way that it was easy for a > company to declare "no first use" on a patent in the space of standards > implementation, and very disruptive for a company to renege on such a > promise (for instance, by having all the "no first use" promises by other > companies being rendered inoperative), we might get something..... but this > is just me thinking aloud. I have not been able to get any patent lawyers > interested in pursuing/spearheading this train of thought. In fact, Larry's "go on the offense" proposal appears to be derived from a patent-termination-clause concept I invented four years ago, which he later wrote into the 1.0 versions of AFL and OSL. It didn't work. None of the legal departments at IBM or the other Fortune-100 corporations with the biggest stake in open source were willing to go first in sacrificing the "advantage" of being able to play multi-billion dollar games of chicken with their portfolios. So I *have* been able to get patent lawyers interested in pursuing/spearheading this train of thought. And it dead-ended. Thus, in part, my belief that IETF and W3C and other standards organizations must lead on this issue or become irrelevant. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf