Sirs, As a body upon whom the developers world-wide depend to provide interoperable communications standards, I would strongly encourage the IETF to endorse only open standards and to refuse proprietary standards of any kind unless provided royalty-free and litigation-free by their owners to the worldwide community in exchange for IETF endorsement. Standards historically speaking have always meant conventions that could be adopted freely without any cost or liability to facilitate exchange of information, trade, scientific knowledge, etc. Think of standard units of measure, e.g. kilograms, meters, and seconds for Science and Trade; International Morse Code for communication; even Diplomatic Protocols for communications between embassies and heads of state. If a vendor wishes to become a de facto proprietary standard, let them earn such status on their own in the marketplace by virtue of compelling technical goodness; but reserve the more exalted "De jure" standards of the IETF for those standards that in addition to technical merit also support unencumbered use over proprietary privilege. Sincerely, Tom Bevington _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf