At 11:50 AM -0500 3/29/07, Mark Brown wrote:
I have experienced some surprises when mixing law and Internet standards. To try to avoid surprises, I have hired IPR attorneys at two different firms to review my draft which proposes a royalty-free license grant. I expect any resulting license will be conditioned upon IETF acceptance of TLS authz as a standard. I hope to have concluded these services next week.
You may feel that this is an offer, but it is in fact a form of bargaining. "If you put this on standards track, then we will (or might) give a royalty-free license". That is a poor bargain for the IETF, and the IETF should not consider the offer when it decides whether or not to make the protocol a standard.
This protocol extension does not seem significant enough for the IETF to be making bargains, particularly when the IPR holder has not shown good faith in the past about being up-front about what they know. A reasonable way forward would be to simply publish it as an Informational RFC as if it had been brought to the RFC Editor as an individual submission.
--Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf