Re: [IPsec] IPR statement for draft-detienne-ikev2-recovery

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

At 9:51 AM +0100 3/22/10, Frederic Detienne wrote:
>I am afraid you are mistaken. Yoav, Yaron, Pratima and I had a discussion about the draft's IPR back in Dublin in July 2008. We told back then that we would have rights released. The process takes its own time but as far as Pratima and I are concerned, we did due diligence.

Thank you.

>Will you share your assumptions directly with us next time ?

As WG co-chair, I need to trust the words and intentions of active WG contributors as much as I can. When the Cisco IPR statement for SIR came out, I was surprised, so I asked your co-author, Yoav Nir, about whether he had known about it. His response was that he had not known about it until after Cisco's recent IPR statement. I took him at his word.

To be clear: this is not a matter of which one of you is telling the truth. It is quite easy that one of you misunderstood the other because the discussion of SIR and QCD had gotten mixed up with the discussion of session resumption and maybe-related topics. There is, I believe, a chance that you told *me* about the pending patent and I forgot. I doubt that, but I also admit to having prejudices about IPR and so on that would cause me to have less-than-perfect memory. I cut you and Yoav the same slack I cut myself.

To be clear, part 2: the patent situation with SIR has not affected the WG's decision yet. There are plenty of companies whose generic IETF patent licenses are similar to those offered by Cisco for SIR. That is why my message to the WG informing them of Cisco's IPR statement said "Before reacting to this announcement, please review the IETF's IPR policy". Knee-jerk reactions to IPR statements can cause more damage in the IETF than IPR statements themselves.

I still stand by my statement that I would have preferred Cisco to issue the statement when we were discussing listing SIR in the charter in this current round: more information is always good. I apologize for saying "at least one of the co-authors on the named draft was not informed of the IPR"; I could have said "I have heard that at least one of the co-authors on the named draft was not informed of the IPR", which is a more accurate statement.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium