Subject: RE: Rechartering to focus on problem

From: Paul Gleichauf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 14:28:01 -0800

There appears to be a lot of commentary about motivations, corporate 
and personal, being added to this list that are highly questionable, 
hostile and disrespectful. A lot of us are motivated to enhance the 
standards process regardless of whether we currently work for big 
companies or not. But we want the result to work, and not cripple our 
ability to get both participation and wide spread implementation of 
our work at the IETF.

The IETF depends upon corporate goodwill in a number of ways. It also 
depends upon open source in interesting ways. My intuition from our 
WG discussions that the vast majority of participants at the IETF 
want to see both continue.

The WG concluded that as near as we can tell from the IETF 
perspective current IPR licensing mostly works, but it does so by 
pushing some burdens on companies that implement and have to license 
the standards the IETF produces. The conclusion was to improve the 
process for defining what responsible participants and the companies 
they may work for should do, and when they should do it.

I intend to concentrate my energy in this area on constructive 
measures of the problems I suspect will become increasingly important 
but cannot document broadly enough to justify further changes today. 
Since these measures depend on a simpler procedure to submit and 
refine claims. It should also help make company's work easier if done 
right. This is an engineering attempt at a solution to a manageable 
part of the problem that can then be used to justify further 
reconsideration at some later date.

In the mean time I would be very interested in talking to the more 
committed open source advocates about how to structure agreements 
that are sufficiently inclusive to meet their needs but fall short of 
demanding RF. Someone has to be clever enough to account for benign 
(as opposed to predatory) corporate requirements and still enable 
widespread open source implementation of protocols.

Paul

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---

From: Zenaan Harkness <[email-masked]>
Date: 21 Mar 2003 11:07:35 +1100

> pushing some burdens on companies that implement and have to license 

Which is in some cases not possible, for Open Source/ Free Software
(OSFS) implementations.

I believe that for 'public' 'standards', some of the burden should
belong to the patent-holders, through some sort of default policy (eg.
disclosure, licensing, etc). To have most/all of the burden on the
implementor, is in my opinion unacceptable for OSFS.

> but cannot document broadly enough to justify further changes today.

Can someone from W3C group point to discourse/ data/ documentation etc
in this regard?

> right.

Companies participating in standards process, or companies implementing
standards?

> This is an engineering attempt at a solution to a manageable 

My understanding comes down to the differences in licensing. There are
essentially two main licenses, the BSD-style (including BSD, X,
Artistic, license) and GPL style (eg. GPL, LGPL). Sometimes variants is
used - eg. GPL with additional clause. Sometimes dual-licensing is used
- eg. Mozilla is dual-licensed as GPL (some parts LGPL) and NPL
(Netscape Public License).

A very comprehensive comparitive run-down of many of the licenses in use
in the free software community is on the FSF's website. Their "licenses"
page"
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html
Their licenses comparison page:
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html

Some points/ quotes that might be of interest:

BSD-style licenses allow you to re-license - eg. you can take BSD
licensed code and relicense under proprietary or other license. You
could relicense under GPL, although this is rarely if ever done due to
common courtesy.

GPL-style licenses impose "the minimum restrictions required in order to
maintain the maximum freedom for all future users of the software".

Thus there are religious flamewars over which licensing style is "more
free", one side claiming the freedom to restrict freedoms as more free,
the other side making freedom essentially a political goal.

"The GNU General Public License is often called the GNU GPL for short;
it is used by most GNU programs, and by more than half of all Free
Software packages."

The GPL is so widely used and therefore the codebase so huge and
therefore potentially useful to other projects, that a number of larger
projects (eg. QT of KDE fame, Mozilla and others) have either changed
their licensing to GPL, or changed from their original license (eg. MPL
or mozilla public license) to dual-licensing.

The GPL allows one to charge as much (or as little) as one desires/ can
for distribution, maintenance, coding, etc., but allows all recipients
of such code the same freedoms. It ensures that I can provide a copy to
my neighbour free of charge. This encourages community/ good
citizenship.

On the other hand, one can add all the restrictions one likes to BSD
licensed software, including no restrictions, and royalty payment
restrictions.

Of course, as soon as a royalty payment is required, the software will
no longer meet the definition of Free Software. The original
comprehensive definition of "acceptably free software" was created by
the Debian community - the Debian Free Software Guidelines, or DFSG. OSI
essentially copied this definition when that organisation came into
being.

Many people in the community (myself) regard the DFSG (and similarly OSI
Open Source Software Definition (I think)) as the definative definition
and requirements for what makes free software "free".

See the full DFSG:
http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

and a shorter run down on the same thing:
http://www.debian.org/intro/free

Can you allow for something short of royalty-free? Sure, but any
standard that is anything but RF will not be able to meet the DFSG. It
will not be implementable as free software.

This is perhaps a fundamental dilemma in achieving what you ask.
"Benign" corporate requirements are fine, as long as I can create a free
software version, which means I need to be able to give a copy of my
code to as many people as I choose, or distribute for a fee to as many
as I choose, without having to pay a royalty to someone. These are
freedoms that are required to classify software as free software/ open
source software.

Perhaps someone else can input at this stage.

cheers
zen

-- 
Mr Zenaan Harkness, Manager, VIDC
Phone: +678 25 151  Fax: +678 25 178  Mobile: +678 45 179
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