Re: [hybi] Process! was: [whatwg] HttpOnly cookie for WebSocket?

["Martin J. Dürst" <[e-mail]>]

Hello Maciej,

On 2010/02/01 20:38, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
> On Feb 1, 2010, at 3:25 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 29 Jan 2010, Julian Reschke wrote:

>>> Feedback that affects the contents of a WG deliverable should be
>>> submitted as "IETF Contribution", as described in
>>> <http://www.ietf.org/about/note-well.html>.
>>
>> I'm not going to ignore feedback that is sent outside the context of this
>> working group.
>
> I don't think the rules that Julian linked require that. The RFCs that apply
> to IETF contributions per that page seem to be about requirements relating
> to intellectual property rights. Specifically, grant of non-exclusive copyright
> license to the IETF Trust, and patent disclosure obligations. I am not sure
> of their relevance to this thread.

Well, I am not a lawyer, and the simple summary here may ignore all 
kinds of details, but essentially a lot of communities (standards 
organizations as well as open source communities) and the people and 
companies involved therein have, over the years, made painful 
experiences with the following scenario:

Person A: "wouldn't it be great if you spec did X."

Editor, WG: "not a bad idea, we'll take that"

(some years later)

Person A: "Hello everybody, I have a patent on X, please start paying."

Patent disclosure obligations are designed to avoid the above scenario. 
People participating in the IETF (and the organizations supporting them) 
appreciate the fact that the IETF has patent disclosure obligations.

People participating in the IETF may have some concerns about "taking 
all input available", not because they don't think that wouldn't be a 
good idea in general, in a world where everybody was nice and there were 
no patents, but because one way or another, they know that this can be 
dangerous.

That's one of the areas where larger and more experienced standards 
organizations (such as the IETF) may have an advantage over smaller and 
more ad-hoc organizations (such as WHATWG). If somebody can convincingly 
show us that WHATWG deals with this problem in a fashion equivalent with 
the IETF, then I think there will be much less concern here on this list.

So I think at least in the sense explained here, what Julian brought up 
here is very relevant for the process thread.


[Copyright is much easier to deal with, because it essentially would go 
like this:

Person B: "Here is some proposal Y for your spec."

Editor, WG: "Great text, we'll just paste it in."

(later)

Person B: "Why the hell are you taking my text? It's me who wrote it, 
it's my copyright, and I don't like it sitting there after that other 
paragrap."

Editor: "Sorry, didn't know. Too bad, have to rewrite these few 
paragraphs so that they say the same thing with different words."
(way cheaper than changing implementations to get around a patent or 
paying royalities)]

Regards,    Martin.

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:[e-mail]