Re: OpenSource vs. IETF Standards

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 4:21 AM, Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Fri 01/Aug/2014 06:02:08 +0200 Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> On 01/08/2014 08:50, manning bill wrote:
>>
>>> As you properly have tabled, some of these IETF standards are
>>> subject to IPR claims, which the IETF mgmt and its sponsoring
>>> organization have prudently recognized.  Publication of such
>>> material, encumbered by Intellectual Property Rights, clearly
>>> suggests that the IETF standard in question can not, in fact, be
>>> represented in open source without violation of IP laws.
>>>
>>> Codec and Crypto specs tend to be owned.
>>
>> If they are published as RFCs the boilerplate will indicate
>> rights; but watch out for the change of rules introduced by RFC5378.
>
> Some organizations, e.g. FSF, actively campaign against patents.  OTOH,
> most SDOs seem to act as mediators between patent owners and their
> clients.  I wonder whether it is at all possible to stand somewhere in
> between liberty and industrial support, rather than taking a firm stand
> on either side.
>
> Of course, it would be impressive if the IETF proclaimed its stand in
> that respect.  RFC 5378 doesn't seem to promise such kind of statement,
> and I'm unable to even imagine how on earth consensus could be achieved
> on such topic...

It all depends on the work you want to do.

Most IETF work does not require the use of encumbered technology
because we have been doing Internet for 40 years now and everything we
do that is new at the TCP layer or below is merely an optimization. We
have been doing Web, email and chat 20 years so the same holds.

So the chance that there is going to be a patent that is blocking is
very small. There is not going to be a patent that allows you to do
TLS or not or allows you to do email or not. So the value of any
patent is limited to the number of bits saved on the wire.


That isn't the case for some of the work done in other SDOs. If you
want to do content protection to allow copyright holders to protect
their IPR then you are going to be dealing with a lot of IPR claims
from patent holders and some of those claims are of the type that you
either pay up or you don't do the work.

So the IETF has done patent deals in the past. We did it for RSA and
DH for example because those were the only ways to do public key
cryptography. It was agree to the patent claims or don't do the work.
But ECC which was merely an optimization did not get anything like the
same treatment and the patent holder's failure to understand that
their IPR simply wasn't anything like as valuable has killed
deployment there until last Tuesday.

I always think that the biggest mistake we made in the Web was not
putting support for an uncompressed audio format in the browser. The
performance would have sucked but doing that would have reduced the
value of the various compression patents to being an optimization of
an existing feature and not the ability to do audio.