Subject: Final repost: "Hum" -- should we recharter now?

From: Steve Bellovin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 10:43:27 -0400

Below is a message that I posted to the list on 26 March.  Again, I 
encourage *everyone* on this list to express their preference.  The two 
week period mentioned in the last line expires on April 9.

--------

We're just about done with the three "clarifications" documents.  We 
now need to decide if we're going to recharter.  The purpose of a 
rechartered IPR working group would be to devise a substantial change 
in the IETF's IPR policy.  One possible new IPR policy would be some 
form of mandatory royalty-free terms; at this point, though, exactly 
what such a new policy would be is not under discussion.

The very simple question I'm posing is this:

	Should the IPR working group recharter at this time to devise
	a substantially new IPR policy?

This question is being posed pursuant to Section 3.3 of RFC 2418.  Note 
in particular the following two paragraphs:

   It can be particularly challenging to gauge the level of consensus on
   a mailing list.  There are two different cases where a working group
   may be trying to understand the level of consensus via a mailing list
   discussion. But in both cases the volume of messages on a topic is
   not, by itself, a good indicator of consensus since one or two
   individuals may be generating much of the traffic.
   
   In the case where a consensus which has been reached during a face-  
   to-face meeting is being verified on a mailing list the people who 
   were in the meeting and expressed agreement must be taken into
   account.  If there were 100 people in a meeting and only a few people
   on the mailing list disagree with the consensus of the meeting then  
   the consensus should be seen as being verified.  Note that enough
   time should be given to the verification process for the mailing list
   readers to understand and consider any objections that may be raised 
   on the list.  The normal two week last-call period should be
   sufficient for this.

The consensus of the rooms in both Atlanta and San Francisco was 
against rechartering.  Does the mailing list agree or disagree?  To aid 
us all in assessing the consensus of the group, I'm asking *everyone* on 
the list to post a simple yes or no answer to the question give above,
even if you think that everyone already knows your position.  Also, 
please post your reply publicly; don't just reply to me.  To aid in 
that, I've set the Reply-to: header line accordingly.  (But please use 
a different Subject: line for discussions of the topic.)

We'll consider this question on the list for two weeks.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)

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---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2003 08:31:31 -0700 (PDT)

My hummm would be "no".

I could be interested in humming "yes" for a different question,
but for the question Steve posed, I'm humming "no".

Spencer

---

From: Max Riegel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 18:11:32 +0200

>         a substantially new IPR policy?

No.
The IPR policy of the IETF has shown to be quite effective. I can't imagine 
anything better for the IETF.

Bye
Max

---

From: John Border <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 16:28:54 -0400

No

---

From: jeremy hunsinger <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2003 19:02:44 -0400

as my position requires some pursuit of the public good over the 
private interest, and lookign look at the recent spat of dot.com 'no' 
responses.  My best engineering judgment tells me that i should say

  yes, recharter now.

Either we recharter this group or close this group and found a new one.

.Jeremy Hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture

---

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2003 18:15:48 -0700 (PDT)

Yes, recharter now. I'll continue to pursue the issue regardless.

	Thanks

	Bruce

---

From: Zenaan Harkness <[email-masked]>
Date: 09 Apr 2003 12:39:07 +1100

> week period mentioned in the last line expires on April 9.

I think that the IPR issue is one that deserves further study and
possibly changes to the existing IPR policy. I therefore hum yes and
recommend a recharter.

zen

---

From: D F <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2003 23:20:19 -0400

I'm forced to contribute a 'yes' to the re-charter issue.

- -- 
Dave Fluri
PGP Public Key-ID 3F64B9AC

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 08:02:48 +0200

could you explain what you mean by this, and how it relates to IETF IPR 
policy?
I can't parse it enough to extract a referent....

               Harald

--On tirsdag, april 08, 2003 19:02:44 -0400 jeremy hunsinger <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> as my position requires some pursuit of the public good over the private
> interest, and lookign look at the recent spat of dot.com 'no' responses.
> My best engineering judgment tells me that i should say
>
>   yes, recharter now.
>

---

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 03:10:22 -0700 (PDT)

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
> could you explain what you mean by this, and how it relates to IETF IPR 

Harald,

I took it as a comment on the difference between the good of a
particular business and the good of the more general public,
considering the monopoly granted by a patent.

The Internet has become the major mode of democratic discourse.
IETF, through its policies, determines some of the terms for
participation in the Internet. Thus, IETF determines some of the
terms for participation in democracy. So it's essential that IETF
consider the effect of its policies on the public good.

	Thanks

	Bruce Perens

---

From: jeremy hunsinger <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 09:03:45 -0400

ietf members are supposed to approach any proposition with their best 
engineering judgment, that includes a responsibility to the public good.

yesterday, as voting continued, i saw 3 individuals, who surprisingly 
had never contributed to the list discussion, all from a .com, vote no, 
with little or no justification of their position.  if i were inclined 
to analyze this discussion statistically, i think that it might become 
more obvious that people seem to be voting ideologically instead of 
based on their best engineering judgment, and considering what would be 
good for the public.  actions here speak louder than words.

ietf's ipr governs standards(amongst other things) and standards insure 
interoperability, patents and property right protection schemes are 
barrier tools, which all end up barring interoperability to some part 
of the public by raising barriers to participation, that is 
antagonistic to the development of the 'internet is for everyone' 
position.  If you take into account the public good as a whole and the 
slippery slope of privatization of standards, you quickly come to see 
that this group needs rechartered or a new group formed to rewrite the 
policy to preserve benefits everyone.   in short the ipr policy could 
make or break the concept of the internet as open and easily 
interoperable over a period of years.  yes ietf practices seem to 
prefer and manage ipr fine today, but ietf is changing, just ask 
around, i think the votes i mention above may be indicative of that 
change, so lets make sure we get 'ipr' right for everyone, other 
interests aside.

> consider the effect of its policies on the public good.
Jeremy Hunsinger

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 15:33:03 +0200

--On onsdag, april 09, 2003 09:03:45 -0400 jeremy hunsinger <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> yesterday, as voting continued, i saw 3 individuals, who surprisingly had
> never contributed to the list discussion, all from a .com, vote no, with
> little or no justification of their position.  if i were inclined to
> analyze this discussion statistically, i think that it might become more
> obvious that people seem to be voting ideologically instead of based on
> their best engineering judgment, and considering what would be good for
> the public.  actions here speak louder than words.

thank you - I didn't parse your sentence as "people with .com addresses are 
saying no, so I have to say yes".

this argument can easily start down a very slippery slope, where we start 
discussing about people's motives instead of focusing on the task at hand.
after all, it is impossible to ascertain how much people have been 
following the list without speaking up; the call did ask for everyone to 
speak their opinion.

> barrier tools, which all end up barring interoperability to some part of
> the public by raising barriers to participation, that is antagonistic to
> the development of the 'internet is for everyone' position.

I, for one, agree with this argument.

> If you take
> into account the public good as a whole and the slippery slope of
> privatization of standards, you quickly come to see that this group needs
> rechartered or a new group formed to rewrite the policy to preserve
> benefits everyone.

This is the argument I don't agree with; I think the public good is well 
served by the current IETF policy. There is much to be improved in the way 
we practice it, however.

>   in short the ipr policy could make or break the
> concept of the internet as open and easily interoperable over a period of
> years.  yes ietf practices seem to prefer and manage ipr fine today, but
> ietf is changing, just ask around, i think the votes i mention above may
> be indicative of that change, so lets make sure we get 'ipr' right for
> everyone, other interests aside.

Eternal vigilance *is* the price of liberty. But my personal opinion is 
that this vigilance is not best served by rechartering this working group, 
thereby giving the impression that IETF rules will change dramatically any 
time soon.
IMHO, the discussion *must* continue.

                    Harald

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 09:37:03 -0400

> with little or no justification of their position.

Conversely, we've got an awful lot of people participating
in this discussion who have never otherwise contributed to
the work of the IETF.  My "no" vote on rechartering was
based on my needs as a WG chair and to a lesser extent as a
document author/editor, not as a '.com' employee.

There are two problem spaces here that are being treated as
the same.  One is the internal problem - how working group
actions reflect or instantiate existing IPR policy.  The IPR
working group was chartered to address this problem,
particularly a lack of clarity in the documentation of
existing policy that's led to confusion in some cases
(which, incidentally, most certainly is an engineering
problem).

The other problem space is the IPR policy itself and whether
or not it needs revision.  That seems to be the problem that
the ideologues are concerned with.  It's also a different
working group.  As people keep saying, if you believe
there's a problem here then you should be able to articulate
that problem in an internet draft with sufficient clarity to
make the case for creating a new working group.  

Melinda

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 06:47:21 -0700 (PDT)

I guess I'm confused. I thought we were humming with a minimum
of justification?

Spencer

--- jeremy hunsinger <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >> could you explain what you mean by this, and how it relates
> to IETF 
> >> IPR
> >> policy?
> >
> > Harald,
> >

---

From: Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]>
Date: 09 Apr 2003 06:56:02 -0700

jeremy hunsinger <[email-masked]> writes:
> had never contributed to the list discussion, all from a .com, vote
> no, with little or no justification of their position.  if i were
> inclined to analyze this discussion statistically,
It might be nice if you actually did this analysis before you came
out swinging.

> i think that it
> might become more obvious that people seem to be voting ideologically
> instead of based on their best engineering judgment, and considering
> what would be good for the public.
I don't think this is quite what you mean, since ideology is probably
part of people's engineering judgement. What I expect you mean
is that people are voting based on what's in *their* interest
rather than the public interest.

> ietf's ipr governs standards(amongst other things) and standards
> insure interoperability, patents and property right protection schemes
> are barrier tools, which all end up barring interoperability to some
> part of the public by raising barriers to participation, that is
> position.
This isn't obvious at all, and your argument doesn't make a very
convincing case (in part since you haven't defined public good).

It's often helpful to look at boundary conditions. Consider the case
where there is a patent that is absolutely essential to something
that we want to do (as the public key patents were in the 90s).
We therefore have the option of standardizing the patented technology
or not standardizing this solution at all. There's a strong argument
to be made that standardizing this solution is Pareto-dominant,
which generally meets almost anyones conception of the public good. [0]

> If you take into account the public good as a whole and the
> policy to preserve benefits everyone.
Other people have come to different conclusions in good faith.
 
-Ekr

[0] Yes, I'm aware of the strategic implications if it's an iterated
game. I'm just trying to point out that it's a lot more complicated
than you seem to think.
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---

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 10:11:47 -0400

In message <[email-masked]>, Spencer Dawkins
>I guess I'm confused. I thought we were humming with a minimum

I don't want to cut off discussion.  What's important is to separate 
"hum" posts from discussion posts, by changing the Subject: line.  
Jeremy had an appropriately terse "hum" post; Harald followed up 
properly with a new Subject: line, and everyone else (including Jeremy) 
has followed up on that post.

In other words, the right thing is happening....

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 07:17:01 -0700 (PDT)

Hi, Steve,

Thanks for following up.

I agree that what's happening is fine, I'm just saying that
terse "hum" postings with no justification aren't evidence of a
conspiracy, hum-box packing (would be "ballot-box packing", but
we don't vote), etc.

Spencer

--- "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Spencer Dawkins writes:
> 		--Steve Bellovin,

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 16:24:35 +0200

> engineering judgment, that includes a responsibility to the public good.

I'd be surprised if you can point to a BCP that says that. The furthest
I would go is "the good of the Internet as a whole."

> with little or no justification of their position.  

Given that all conceivable arguments have been rehashed 20 times
on this list, why should anybody need to hum more than "yes"
or "no"?

   Brian

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 07:27:04 -0700 (PDT)

I agree with Melinda on every point, including her reasons for
humming "no", and think if IPR-WG had been named IPR-CLARIFY the
mailing list archives would be an order of magnitude smaller. 

The obvious assumption when you find out there's an "IPR working
group" is that this working group would be solving the second
problem Melinda lists - but we're solving the first problem.

Yeah, people should read the charter ... but the charter does
include an option for the second problem ...

Spencer

---

From: jeremy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 11:53:10 -0400

my post last night was a hmmm to say yes.  

my post this morning was a clarification of why i said yes, and yes many 
of those arguments have already been made and need not be restarted 
again.  we are all familiar with them and we can disagree as to their 
merits.

several minor points, this morning i was not saying that there was any 
conspiracy.  i was not launching any ad hominen attacks, though i seemed 
to have generated some in response:(.  I apologize if there were 
interpretations that led some to conclude that was my goal.  What i was 
doing was simple observation of tendencies, if you want to debate the 
merits of that, it is probably better done off list as i'm not going to 
describe small n induction and validity here and off list i will 
probably just give you a reading list.  If you disagree with any 
inference that I might have made, we can take it off list.  As for the 
recent association with discrimination, i'm not discriminating in any 
negative way.  What i was doing was what we do everyday as humans, it is 
called identification and induction, it does not necessarily do anything 
other than demonstrate an association, and yes people who do social 
research do look at groups of people and say given what they have done 
they are more or less likely to do something else or given that they 
participate in this groups activities they are likely to participate in 
this way as opposed to that. There are quite a few arguments involved in 
statistical research of this nature, and we don't need to go over them 
here.  If you want to dispute the inference that there is a tendency for 
people employed in certain activities to act certain ways, we should 
probably debate that off list.

I really was not making any assumptions about what you were thinking or 
what motivated you.  I did make claims about what you should be 
motivated by 'the public good', but those were based from the 'Internet 
is for Everyone' document and the professional code of ethics for 
software engineers and other professions. I think that remembering such 
things is good engineering practice in this context.  but i tend to be 
more concerned with such things than other people, it may have been a 
faux paux, and if it was I am sorry.

I think that we should either recharter this group, or start a new one 
because while the current policy and traditions seem to work and the 
revisions clarify them in interesting ways, they may reach a crisis 
point in the near future and that needs to be handled before it happens. 
   Rechartering this group would be more efficient solution to pursuing 
those questions, but the hmmm will decide that.

have a nice day,

jeremy hunsinger

---

From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 12:16:09 -0400

Hummm.... No, we should not recharter to "devise a substantially new IPR
policy"
(Note: source of message is dot.us, not dot.com ...)
	The existing policy, as recently recorded and clarified,
provides the appropriate degree of flexibility for productive work to be
done. This policy properly discourages the incorporation, without
sufficient justification, of IPR encumbered methods into IETF standards.
I cannot see how more can be done without fundamentally changing the
nature and goals of the IETF.
	I believe that the wg-guidelines document should be the focus of
attention in the future. While what is there is a very good start, I'm
sure that substantial effort could be productively devoted to clarifying
how WG's should handle, and hopefully avoid, IPR issues.

		bob wyman

---

From: jeremy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 10:47:59 -0400

>
> Eternal vigilance *is* the price of liberty. But my personal opinion 
> is that this vigilance is not best served by rechartering this working 
> group, thereby giving the impression that IETF rules will change 
> dramatically any time soon.

Yes, i think the discussion must continue and that there is room for 
difference of opinion.

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 11:06:13 -0700

Hi -

> From: "jeremy hunsinger" <[email-masked]>
> To: <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 6:03 AM
> Subject: Re: "dot.com 'no' responses"? (Re: Final repost: "Hum")
...
> good for the public.  actions here speak louder than words.
...

I'm amazed how you were able to draw these astute conclusions about
my affiliations (a WG chair, no employer and not looking) from my ISP's
domain name.  I still think the right thing to do is to deploy the clarifications
and see whether the system continues to work as well as it has.

Randy

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 16:00:57 -0400

> had never contributed to the list discussion

i did not realize we were qualifying posters.  but if we are

    % grep -i hunsinger rfcs/rfc-index.txt 
    % 

now can we get back to work?

randy

---

From: Matthew J Zekauskas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 22:29:31 -0400

hoping I'm not too late... (too much travel, not enough list
email reading):

I say "no" to the question below.  My thoughts are well articulated
by Melinda Shore in her last message with the 'dot.com...' subject.

--Matt