Ted Tso wrote: > Since the letter was sent in January 2006, IBM has moved to a new way > of dealing with patents and standards, with its "Interoperability > Specification Pledge", which is essentially an irrovocable covenant > not to assert any Necessary Claims to anyone making, using, importing, > selling, or offerring for sale any Covered Implementations, with a > broad defensive clause. This was announced in July of this past year, <snip> IBM's "Interoperability Specification Pledge" is fully consistent with the patent policy I urge generally upon IETF. We should encourage companies to adopt similar covenants for IETF specifications. Thanks, IBM. /Larry > -----Original Message----- > From: Theodore Tso [mailto:tytso@xxxxxxx] > Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 6:40 AM > To: Simon Josefsson > Cc: Frank Ellermann; ietf@xxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices > > On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 03:10:29PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: > > "Frank Ellermann" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > > Do you refer to the IBM patent on BOCU? As far as I have understood, > > IBM promised to grant a free patent license to people who requested it, > > but people never received a license despite requesting one. If this is > > accurate, I think it is a good example of a technology that should not > > be standardized and should not be promoted by the community. > > Can someone give an example of someone who has requested a license but > not received one, please? (For reference, there is a copy of a letter > which was apparently sent from IBM to the Unicode consortium here: > http://unicode.org/notes/tn6/) > > Since the letter was sent in January 2006, IBM has moved to a new way > of dealing with patents and standards, with its "Interoperability > Specification Pledge", which is essentially an irrovocable covenant > not to assert any Necessary Claims to anyone making, using, importing, > selling, or offerring for sale any Covered Implementations, with a > broad defensive clause. This was announced in July of this past year, > and more details can be found here: > > http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/opensource/ispinfo.shtml > > BOCU is not on the list of Covered Specifications, but my guess is > that such an omission is very likely due to an oversight rather than > any kind of maliciousness. The good news is this new framework > doesn't require any kind of formal request to obtain a patent license, > and so hopefully a request to move the offer of a RF license covering > BOCU to the Interopreability Specification Pledge framework would > hopefully take care of your issue. > > - Ted > > P.S. All opinions stated above are my own, and do not necessarily > reflect IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions. > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf