Paul Hoffman wrote: > Which SDOs that you participate in want to see other SDOs publishing > *incompatible* versions of their protocols? Hi Paul, Of course none of the SDOs that I work with want to see incompatible versions. But this turns the issue on its head. Open source and open standards deal with the freedom to do things, even though we might discourage people to take us up on that offer of freedom. So with respect to IETF specifications, the open source and open standards objective is that the world is *free* to make compatible or incompatible versions of our specifications. (This is the philosophy that neither IETF nor Microsoft nor IBM, nor anyone else, is going to be the absolute God of acceptable software.) I'm sure that good people everywhere will cooperate to ensure that all good versions of our specifications are compatible, and cooperative people will be encouraged to remain compatible by virtue of the quality of our work. But if anyone, anywhere, for any reason, wants to take an IETF specification and modify it, open source requires that he be free to do so. The current proposed IPR policy seems to allow that for "code" but not for "text" in our specifications. What a burden that imposes to protect people from freedom! /Larry > -----Original Message----- > From: Paul Hoffman [mailto:paul.hoffman@xxxxxxxx] > Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 3:19 PM > To: lrosen@xxxxxxxxxxxx; ietf@xxxxxxxx > Cc: ipr-wg@xxxxxxxx > Subject: RE: FW: IETF copying conditions > > At 2:43 PM -0700 9/17/08, Lawrence Rosen wrote: > >I'm moving this to ietf@xxxxxxxxx There are important policy implications > >here that the entire community should understand before we let the IPR WG > >decide for us on a policy so opposite to open source and open standards! > > Larry, I'm confused. What about the statement that "We don't want to > see other SDOs publishing *incompatible* versions of our protocols, > period" is the opposite of the policy of open standards (emphasis > added)? > > Which SDOs that you participate in want to see other SDOs publishing > *incompatible* versions of their protocols? > > --Paul Hoffman, Director > --VPN Consortium _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf