--On Friday, 30 March, 2007 10:12 -0700 Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. For whatever it is worth, I think we need to step carefully around the distinction Paul makes above: there are almost certainly circumstances in which we should accept a broader grant of rights conditional on standardization and a narrower one if the technology is not standardized. I wish the IPR WG were paying a bit more attention to this sort of issue. However, in this particular case, I tend to agree with Paul. While I'd be happy to hear the opinion of the TLS WG on the subject, I don't think the case has yet been made that these extensions are sufficiently important that the IETF should standardize an encumbered technology --or engage in a negotiation about those encumbrances, especially with parties who appear to have been less forthcoming in the past than our rules require. I also do not believe that it is appropriate to view Informational publication as some sort of consolation prize. If the community, and the IESG, conclude that the document and its technology should be standardized, then Informational publication should not be automatic: the document should be reviewed for sponsorship appropriateness according the IESG's recently-published procedures or actually handed off to the RFC Editor as an independent submission. john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf