On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 4:16 PM, SM <sm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have not seen any feedback from IETF participants affiliated with Huawei.
Hi.
I'm affiliated with Huawei. I'm a (recently added; see below)
co-editor on the two Sieve documents. I'm a chair of three working
groups.
> I suggest that the IESG does not process any Internet-Drafts until a
> decision has been taken.
That seems excessive. Shut down all document progress until we
resolve this issue? I think that cure is far worse than the disease.
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 12:37 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx>
wrote:>> We were told by the other company employees who facilitated
>> the disclosures, at the time of the disclosures, that this was>> strictly an individual's failure to comply with the IETF IPR>> Policy, that the author in question claims not to have>> understood the IETF IPR Policy, and that the company proceeded>> to make these disclosures as soon as it discovered that this>> IPR existed. I have no information to contradict that claim.>> Excellent. I had hoped that was the situation. It obviously> makes things much easier (and some of my earlier comments> irrelevant). With all the effort we go to ("Note Well" and> otherwise) to be sure that people are informed about the policy,> I have trouble generating sympathy for someone who says "didn't> underatand", but that is another matter (and perhaps just my> problem).
That is, indeed the situation. Qian Sun, the original Huawei author,
got a new assignment in the company, and stopped participating in the
IETF a few years ago, after he and Alexey had started the documents.
I can't speak for him about why he didn't understand the disclosure
rules; as I understand it, he seems to have thought the patents didn't
need to be disclosed until the RFC was published.
> If the other authors from that company have already told us that
> they were not aware of the patent application until very late in
> the process and that they moved diligently toward getting an
> appropriate disclosure filed as soon as they did find out, my
> suggestion is moot.
Some time last year, Kepeng and I offered to work with Alexey to
finish the two docs, which had seen slow progress for some while.
Only when the documents were approved and in the RFC Editor queue did
Kepeng learn about Qian's patent applications. He immediately alerted
me. I asked the RFC Editor to stop publication (one was in AUTH48 at
the time), and alerted Pete Resnick and the Sieve chairs. Kepeng
pushed Huawei's IP law department to expedite the disclosure, which
they turned around in two days for us. I assure all of you that
Kepeng and I were blindsided by this.
> I was concerned about the (thoroughly unlikely in this case)
> possibility that the other authors from that company were> personally aware of the IPR but had been, e.g., advised that> they were not to make the disclosure because someone else would> take responsibility for it.
Unlikely in this case, yes. I leave it to you whether you trust what
I say, but I can only repeat that we did not know, and acted very
quickly when we found out.
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy <msk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I also thought about suggesting a DNP or a standing DISCUSS or something until
> the license terms are made more IETF-friendly
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think the license terms are at issue
here. As I understand it, the terms that Huawei has been specifying
in its disclosures are defensive, and shouldn't restrict standards
implementations. The issue we're discussing isn't the terms, but that
the disclosures weren't made when they should have been.
I can't speak officially for Huawei in general, but I can say that it
is Huawei's company policy that we *do* comply with the rules of the
organizations we participate in. I can also say that starting a
couple of years ago, we have taken many opportunities to remind all of
our IETF participants of the disclosure requirements, and we have a
coordinator in place to help them if they need help. And some of the
disclosures you're seeing now are due to a concerted effort to find
where we've missed, and to rectify the situations by disclosing now.
> The document could be restricted to Experimental status, but that presumes the
> status matters as much as or more than the RFC number. I don't know if that's
> true or not in this case.
That, too, strikes me as a cure that's worse than the disease.
"Experimental" isn't a punishment, and I think it would be a horrid
idea to use the document's status in that way. Protocols are
Experimental or Standards Track for good reasons. Documents are
Informational or not for good reasons. Let's please not adulterate
the document status as a way of addressing personnel issues. And by
altering the status or refusing to publish a completed document, we
affect the working group and the entire community of prospective
implementors. If a protocol (or informational document or whatever)
was worth publishing in the first place, pulling it or reclassifying
it as a punishment does the community a disservice.
The reason to remove or reclassify a document is if the working group
(or the community) thinks that for that particular document, the
intellectual property issue really does affect whether the document
should be published, or what its classification should be,
irrespective of any punishment.
Barry
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