[Tinyos-alliance] IETF process

[Matt Welsh]

Sure thing. I didn't intend my language to be anything official - just
an informal idea based on my crude understanding of the IETF policy.
I agree with David that the wording has to be careful to not be one-
sided; in particular, I noted that the W3C's policy (which does not
permit any protocols to be encumbered with IPR) is problematic.

By the way, Scott Bradner offered to speak to this group about their
policy if you are interested, I could invite him to join the next call.

Matt

On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 08:30 -0800, David E. Culler wrote:
> 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?
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Tinyos-alliance mailing list
> > Tinyos-alliance at millennium.berkeley.edu
> > https://mail.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tinyos-alliance 
> >
> 
>