The two types of wiggle room that experience has taught me to be highly undesirable are:
1) Wiggle room of the form 'our terms are as good as RANDZ' when what is being offered is going to require licensing for significant classes of implementation, for example:
A Terms that preclude commercial implementation
B Terms that effectively preclude open source
C Terms that preclude particular types of open source license
D Terms that allow certain uses but allow the IPR holder to reserve certain key use types such as providing essential services.
2) Wiggle room of the type 'customary RANDZ terms are not acceptable from you because'
A We don't like your company and want to make life difficult for you
B We have discovered a theological objection to the customary terms
C We lost a debate in another forum and would like to reopen it
D We have a technical objection and will use this as a veto
While it is impossible to determine what the motive of a party might be in a given circumstance I have heard all of these motives at least plausibly ascribed to one or more parties in real situations.
The most pernicious of these in my view is 1D. This should not be considered RANDZ, it is a royalty based licensing scheme where the rights holder has decided to maximize their revenues by applying a particular business model.
From: Sam Hartman [mailto:hartmans-ietf@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Tue 23/10/2007 3:18 PM
To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip
Cc: Scott Brim; ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices [Re: Third LastCall:draft-housley-tls-authz-extns]
Phil, I understand what you're trying to do. I agree that more wiggle
room makes it harder.
However I think that to achieve consensus you're going to need to
allow working groups to choose to turn on the wiggle room.
I think that you could get somewhere with an opt-in proposal. For a
particular technology or WG, the WG can opt-in to something with very
little wiggle room. I personally don't think you can do better than
that.
However I do think you could put together some standard optinos to
opt-in to.
_______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf