GPL would not be a criterion I would consider reasonable. And in particular I would not accept the idea that the IETF or any other body be committed to whatever notions insert themselves into RMS in the future. I have actually met RMS.
What I would like to do here is to arrive at a set of terms that is considered to be sufficiently RANDZ to be sufficiently compatible with the consensus amongst open source developers. At the moment I do not see a consensus in favor of GPL 3.0.
Having seen a WG crash and burn after theological discussions over open source license compatibility I would like to see an IETF level consensus that terms X are sufficiently open for most purposes. If someone had a reason to beleive that these were not sufficient in a specific working group for specific reasons these could then be argued in the WG if there was a WG consensus that this was necessary.
Contrawise if someone were to argue that there was a case that made it necessary to accept RAND terms with a paid license this would also be an option but one that I would expect to be the rare exception which is the reason I started my example 'absent a compelling technical case'.
Most of the IPR that becomes troublesome was originally filed as defensive. I am going to be filing a lot more patent applications in the future, the main business case for doing so being to reduce (not eliminate) patent liability exposure. I would like to have the licensing criteria established at the time we make the application, not three times (on application, on starting work in WG, on finalizing work in WG) with possibly different lawyers.
From: Scott Kitterman [mailto:scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wed 24/10/2007 11:33 AM
To: ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: A priori IPR choices
On Wednesday 24 October 2007 06:50, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> Scott Kitterman <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > And that will never fly (IANAL) with the GPL and so here we sit at an
> > impasse again. So either a GPL implementation is important to
> > interoperability in a given space or it is not. If it is important to
> > interoperabilty, then this is a showstopper. If not, maybe not.
>
> Do you have any specific example of an internet standard for which you
> think that lack of GPL-compatible licensing of any (perhaps just
> hypothetical) relevant patents would not cause interoperability serious
> problems if the patent holder chose to aggressive enforce the terms of
> that non-GPL-compatible patent license?
>
No. My point was that for the IETF, interoperability is the goal, not some
general statement about goodness of Free software. In many/most/maybe all
cases, this will require any IPR restrictions to be GPL compatible.
Scott K
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