On Oct 21 2004, at 17:49 Uhr, Tim Bray wrote:
If the IETF wants to ignore history and build an Internet where that doesn't hold, feel free, but it's not a very interesting kind of place.
This has been rehashed a lot, but there are two little facts left out from the current repetition of the discussion:
1) There are technologies being standardized in the IETF that don't impact the entire Internet.
So what if Republican Parcel Ricochets [name slightly changed] require IPR -- you can still build viable Internets without them, and it is still useful to have some standards how the Internet uses them, if somebody wants to. [There were IPR claims on Ethernet, by the way, and I do support RFC1042 staying around.]
2) There are lots of patents that reasonable people have to ignore to stay sane.
Imagine someone patented sending only certain bits of a protocol data item in a packet to save space, or maybe sending checksums along to verify protocol operation.
Should that hold any further development of HDLC, NTP, or TCP?
This is not a theoretical consideration.
(I apologize about the thinly veiled references to actual IPR claims. I try to never discuss IPR claims on a mailing list.)
I'm all for a W3C-like stance on standards that do affect the whole Internet.
It's hard work [TM], though, and there are no simple answers until software interoperability patents go the way of the Dodo.
Gruesse, Carsten
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