Free-software gadfly takes on Net group (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com reports on Bruce Perens' idea to pack the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a key Internet standard body. "Free-software advocates have until March to rally their troops to the IEFT front. The group holds its spring meeting in San Francisco from March 16 to 23, at which time it will decide whether to recharter the existing group to weigh a switch to a royalty-free policy."

to post comments

Mailing list to join is ipr-wg-request@ietf.org

Posted Nov 26, 2002 0:20 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

Hi folks,

The IPR working group list subscription address is ipr-wg-request@ietf.org, just send it "subscribe", and you will be a member of the working group.

Again, I don't want to be cynical about this. There is room for a lot more participation by Free Software / Open Source folks in the technical working groups. So, please visit IETF.org and find the ones you are interested in. Don't let corporate interests dominate IETF - help bring balance back to what was once the paragon of openness.

Thanks!
Bruce Perens

What's an IPR?

Posted Nov 26, 2002 1:22 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

For all those who don't know (including me 2 minutes ago), IPR stands
for Internet Property Rights.

I also ask people to email the W3C about there intended royalty-free patent
policy. Although quite good it is still restrictive in one way: it only
requires patents to be royalty free for the owners intended "field of use".

For the FSFs summary, check out:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html

Or to read the draft, go to:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-20021114/

Please email comments asking them to require patents to be royalty-free
for all fields of use. Otherwise their standards may not be usable in
Free Software applications. The address is:
www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org

(Back to the topic)
Thanks for your efforts Bruce!
Got any opinions on www.digitalspeech.org?

Ciaran O'Riordan

IETF consensus

Posted Nov 26, 2002 22:28 UTC (Tue) by adm01bass (guest, #6269) [Link]

Unfortunately, although I was at the Atlanta IETF meeting, I was not able to make it to that group. However, I suspect given the jabber transcript that the principal reasoning was that there are many existing standards that would be awkward to revise if the policy were changed. It seems that there is a strong feeling that, despite the written policy, that is only there to cover the corner cases and that in general IETF standards should be IPR free.

Also, IETF consensus can change radically between meetings, while not very much at the meetings. It would be a better idea to pack the mailing lists before SF.