In general, I support your goal of permitting free software to fully use IETF standards. A few specific comments below, which should be taken as encouragement to continue and refine the terms, not criticism against the whole approach. "Lawrence Rosen" <lrosen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > 1. Everyone is free to copy and distribute the official specification > for an open standard under an open source license. I would include "modify" in this clause, or clarify exactly which license you are talking about (e.g., GNU Free Documentation License). If I want to include portions of an RFC in my software manual (e.g., a terminology section), I want my users to have the right to modify that portion of the manual and re-distribute the derived work. I don't feel qualified to comment on the remaining patent related points. > If you think it would be useful to submit these five Open Standards > Principles as an informational RFC, certainly I can do that. But perhaps > they can be discussed here first in their current form without that > formality. I welcome comments and suggestions. If there is no broad discussion of these issues, perhaps publishing a discussion of them as an informational RFC is the right thing. I think the first goal here should be to make sure the IETF is aware of the problem wrt free software. Given the earlier discussion in this thread, some IPR WG participants appeared to not even be aware that there is a problem, which I found surprising if not disturbing. Thanks, Simon _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf