Kathleen, thanks for the followup...
On 9/12/2017 11:30 AM, Kathleen Moriarty wrote:
Going back to my original posting:
What guidelines do you believe exist and where are they documented?
From my experience, BCP 78 & 78 are the usual references offered as a
starting point for legal representatives to review. Then if anything
is a little different, the trust is asked for advice and sometimes it
goes to legal for discussion and clarification.
My original note did use the term "formal agreement" but was not focused
on IPR legalities, per se.
My note listed explicitly: "any constraints on the handoff, and sets any
constraints on the efforts of the initial working group. (The
constraints can range from 'only bug fixes' to 'use the existing work
merely as conceptual input'.)" BCP 78 has to do with IPR and not the
procedural kinds of issues I raised.
How is someone supposed to find those guidelines?
They ask a chair or AD seems to be the usual path.
This presumes that everyone in such positions is equally knowledgeable
on such matters, and handles such queries in the same fashion, while of
course neither is true. So, really, this means that the entire process
is entirely ad hoc, each time, ensuring a minimum of consistency.
These are things
people usually want to talk about and don't happen too often, so the
conversation is worth the effort.
The fact that it doesn't happen very often -- though really it happens
with some regularity -- ensures that each person contacted will have to
invent/guess how to handle it.
How does someone see the history of agreements that were formulated, as
further guidance about what the IETF arranges?
There are many with differing outcomes, so this may not be helpful,
IMO. We need some flexibility, well, because lawyers.
Alas, the question I asked had nothing to do with lawyers. It had to do
with arranging for work to be done.
This is confusing, in several ways. First, historically the IETF always
insisted on taking change control before agreeing to work on/standardize a
specification. The only constraint on this, historically, was on the
original round of work, but with no constraints on later work. So this
sounds like an extremely basic policy got changed somewhere along the way.
That's not true. The PKCS series was published without handing over
change control until very recently. See
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3447 as an example.
The IESG writeup for this document includes:
"This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product
of an IETF Working Group."
Perhaps there is some confusion happening here, about the difference
between being published as an RFC vs. being processed by the IETF, and
especially invoking an IETF task, typically as a working group?
When has the IETF operated a working group that modified a specification
the IETF did not have change control over?
It also suggests that the IETF has sometimes become a subcontractor for some
other group (that retains change control.)
Or a publisher of well-known and deployed standards.
Again, the question was not about RFC publication but about IETF work on
a specification.
d/
--
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Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net