As a personal political view, I happen to be opposed to the notion of software patents. But I still think that the document in question should be published as Experimental: - It's quite plain that this political view has never been adopted by IETF consensus. (I also think it plain that it has no chance of being adopted by IETF consensus.) - I don't think the IETF considers "this document offends my political point of view" to be a legitimate reason for opposing the document. The degree of passion and/or repetition with which the political view is expressed is irrelevant. (The suppression of a document for political reasons is frequently called "censorship", even if other avenues of publication still exist.) - It's really within the province of each WG to determine whether its standards are implementable by whoever needs to implement them in order for the standard to be successful. This may or may not include open source implementations. - If a particular proposal is technically sound, but not adopted because the WG thinks that its patent encumbrances are a bar to implementation, then it is perfectly valid to publish the proposal as a non-standard track RFC. The only real criterion is that the technical content be interesting or otherwise worth preserving. With regard to the coordinated letter writing attack being waged on this list, well, we're all familiar with the situation in which folks try to get their way by getting lots of non-participants to send scripted messages. Often you can tell that the message writers don't even know what the issues are, but at least most of the letter writing campaigns pretend to be about technical issues; the current campaign doesn't even bother with the pretense! _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf