On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:24:02PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote: > Ted, jumping ahead a little bit, how much of your concern would > be eliminated if that entry in the template said "Royalty Free > and RAND" (or "RAND and Royalty Free"), rather than just RF? I > agree that "RF and totally unreasonable" is a possible case, but > am trying to understand whether we have a disconnect about the > language we have used or about some general and important > principle? I believe that this is the minimum we should have just simply to protect the needs of commercial/propietary consumers of our standards, so yes, that addresses much of my concern. I believe it would be better if "Royalty Free" were more strictly defined to include irrevocability *AND* either (a) the ability to sublicense or (b) the ability for end-users to automatically get a grant of permission without having to perform any explicit action, as was done in Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. Unlike some OSS advocates, I don't feel a particular need to to require a patent license which is valid for any field of endeavor; just the essential claims necessary to implement an IETF standard is IMHO sufficient (realistically I doubt many IPR holders would be willing grant more than that). And I suspect there is general consensus that terms which revoke permission in case of patent litgation (even the GPLv3 has such terms) is not controversial at all. But regardless of what definition we end up, I think we should more explicitly define what we mean by Royalty Free, just to prevent companies from engaging in PR/Marketing games. If it ends up being a definition which means that it might not necessarily be useful to OSS implementors (i.e., the end-user must in apply in person at the offices of MegaCorp in Nome, Alaska example), at least it's well defined and people are put on notice that they can't trust the IETF when we say something is Royalty Free that the specification could be really implemented by Open Source Software developers without doing more digging into the details of the license --- which might not be in the IPR disclosure. It's not ideal, but at least people would know where they stand. - Ted Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed in this message are my own and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer. I'm not important enough to affect the opinions of my employer. :-) _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf