[Tinyos-alliance] IETF process

[David E. Culler]

Good to put this out there.  It offers a crisp black-and-white extreme 
from which we can have useful discussion around the gradiations and 
subtleties.

 I think one thing we need to be careful about is wording that is 
overtly company hostile.  These issues apply to individuals as well as 
companies.  Moreover, lots of universities are trying to make a whole 
business out of their IP.  In all cases, there may be a tension between 
the interests of the submitter and the community.  You want to avoid the 
community becoming trapped and we all want the technology to move 
forward.  We should try to avoid "us" vs "them" kind of language.

While we might all agree with the goal, there isn't an organization in 
existence, either open source or proprietary, that could make a claim 
such as this.  It would imply that a full patent search of all possible 
areas were done for everything.  Even if no one knows of any IP, even 
the submitter, there may still be IP out there.  This is why every 
license agreement has wording to deal with the "we can't possibly know 
everything".  No organization, and especially no university, will sign 
up for any agreement that requires them to search all possible IP.  This 
was a big issue in negotiating the open collaborative research 
agreement.  A "free" and "open" situation can suddenly become incredibly 
costly.

The IETF takes a much more reasoned approach here.  It says that if you 
know of potentially infringing IP there is a mechanism to air it.  It 
says that if you propose standard that cannot reasonably be implemented 
without infringement of IP that you know about, you must declare it.  It 
has strong guidance about avoiding such encumbrances - and certainly the 
trust of the effort strives to achieve that in all cases.  But it allows 
enough room to handle matters as they arise.

The problem with the "must license" is that it is hard to determine 
where the boundary is.  Who decides whether some piece of IP owned by 
company X or individual Y qualifies?  Everybody is concerned about reach 
through.

These are some of the grey areas that often consortiums try to address 
by creating an IP pool.  Even so, you end up with the tug-a-wars of 
companies playing the patent stack staredown.

One of the other insights in IETF was to allow aspects of the process to 
guide the legalese.  They take the view that materials presented are not 
confidential.  That greatly reduces the problems of leading the 
consortium down the garden path.



Jack Stankovic wrote:

>
>> ----
>>
>> PROPOSAL FOR THE TINYOS ALLIANCE: We may wish to consider a process in
>> which companies are allowed to contribute to TinyOS, but anything that
>> gets included in the TinyOS source code or as part of a standards
>> document (should we produce those) either (a) is unencumbered by IP
>> claims or (b) has a license for royalty-free use, implementation,
>> distribution, etc. of any associated IPR. This would exclude
>> contributions that necessitate users or implementers to get a license
>> from the IP holder, which seems to be consistent with an "open source"
>> model. I am not sure how workable this is, but wanted to put that out
>> there.
>>
>> Matt
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  
>>
>
> I like the above proposal by Matt.  Was this explicitly discussed this 
> past week?
>
>
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