Re: A priori IPR choices

[Norbert Bollow <[e-mail]>]

Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On 2007-10-26 06:09, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> > For an extreme example, consider hypothetically the case that an
> > essential part of the IPv6 protocol stack had such a patent issue.
> 
> To be blunter than Ted, this is a problem that the GPL community
> has to solve, not the IETF.

*If* in some way a standard for patent licenses gets chosen which
is strict enough to guarantee compatibility with the concept of
copyleft open source / free software, but which however turns out
not to guarantee compatibility with the GPL, then I agree that it
is acceptable to say the remaining part of the problem is something
that the GPL community has to solve, for example by creating a
GPLv4 which is compatible with a larger set of patent licenses than
GPLv3 is.

However, in practice, incompatibility issues between patent licenses
and any version of the GPL which has been published so far are not
typically the result of specifics of how the GPL implements the
concept of copyleft, but rather the incompatibility issues usually
result from those patent licenses being incompatible already with the
basic concept of open source / free software.  Combining such a patent
license with a copyright license of any kind for some program cannot
possibly result in a program which is open source / free software.
Therefore copyleft licenses must by definition be incompatible with
such patent licenses.

The question is this:  Is copyleft open source / free software so
unimportant with regard to any area of internet standards that it
would be justifiable to adopt any specification with fundamentally
incompatible patent situation as a standards-track RFC?

I believe that the answer to this question very clearly is no!

For justification of this position I point to the facts that
Microsoft is clearly acting like it perceives copyleft open source /
free software to be the main threat for their near-monopoly market
position, and that in the domain of networking equipment where there
is not a problem with a Microsoft near-monopoly, a very similar
problem nevertheless exists from the perspective of developing
countries.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <[e-mail]>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org

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