Subject: RE: Shuffle those deck chairs!

From: "Thomas Gal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:36:12 -0700

Comments inline

> Eric,
> 
> We're not out to rid the world of patent-laden work, nor are 
> we out to make patent owners rich.  The IETF exists to 
> promulgate relevant and correct standards to the Internet 
> Community, and educate people on their intended safe use.  
> There is a fine balance to be had between the two extremes.  
> We are only part of the open source community if what you 
> mean is that participation is open to all, and our documents 
> are freely available to all.  Keep this in mind: the vast 
> majority of participants in the IETF are funded by their 
> employers to attend, and MOST of the resulting code is NOT 
> open source.
> 

	Right....AND there's a difference between some small standard that
doesn't affect a lot of people and still has many competing proprietary
implementations, versus quite possibly the most ubiquitous IP application on
earth (email). For example at the last IETF meeting someone made it clear
that they had IP on the data in one RTP packet format or another (the
details escape me and are irellevant) and little issue was raised.
	While I personally think there will forever be an expanding core of
open source software, and IP is on it's way out, I don't think Open source
software is somehow more righteous then proprietary software. To me it's
just an inevitable consequence of software becoming uniquitous, and the
intelligence of many of the people at the core of the development world,
similar to acadamia where being wrong is OK and peer review and
reproducability are paramount (I just realized this myself though I've been
in acadamia for a while on and off). In short the IETF is the refuge of
people who treat technology as a science not a product(while it may of
course lead to many as science does). I too am supported by an employer who
has proprietary code as one of their products. There will always be
proprietary software around the core.

> The history of complex standards is that it takes time to get 
> them done correctly.  Take a look at MIME, one of the 
> standards that you used in the construction of your email 
> message.  That effort was the outcome of a huge debate that 
> started in 1990 and didn't get out the door until 1992, and 
> that was an argument amongst a relatively small group of 
> people.  So just because MARID didn't finish doesn't mean the 
> IETF is done with spam.
> 

	For a long time the IETF was not even recognized because it wasn't a
dues based organization, nor was it government controlled and chartered. Yet
it has and continues to work amazingly, and I believe the organization and
attitiude of the majortiy of it's members is reflected in the openess and
interoperability of the internet in general. Today it's an accepted part of
the way things in the world are done. And doesn't the internet work
beautifully today? I think so! Granted it would be nice if software could
co-ordinate like the semiconductor industry does, but even there there are
competing ideas beyond the core feature size agreements and semincon. It's
interesting to note that MIME, which was done right has now pervaded SO much
more than was originally intended.

<quote from Eric Raynmond>

A month later, my assessment of the political damage the Sender-ID mess has
done to IETF has only gone up.  You are on a fast road to irrelevance,
gentlemen.  You'd best be thinking about how to change
*that* rather than conducting meaningless exercises in rearranging your
bureaucracy.

</quote from raymond>

	That being said when science (which is what I consider the IETF)
confronts reality sometimes they butt heads. Doesn't it seem that publishing
a standard that is generally considered worthless and non-implementable by
the core of the internet that runs on open source software is a faster path
to irellevance than anything?

Tom

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---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 21:44:02 +0200

On 12-okt-04, at 19:36, Thomas Gal wrote:

> and IP is on it's way out

Please note that in the IETF the letters "IP" first and foremost mean 
"Internet Protocol". To use them for something else is confusing.

---

From: Ted Faber <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 13:27:42 -0700

> "Internet Protocol". To use them for something else is confusing.

To forestall the question, when communicating with the IETF one
shortens "intellectual property" to "IPR."  You can pretend it
abbrieviates "Intellectual Property Rights" or "Intellectual PRoperty."
It replaces both phrases in discourse and writing.

-- 
Ted Faber
http://www.isi.edu/~faber           PGP: http://www.isi.edu/~faber/pubkeys.asc
Unexpected attachment on this mail? See http://www.isi.edu/~faber/FAQ.html#SIG 
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---

From: Nathaniel Borenstein <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 13:40:05 -0400

> people.  So just because MARID didn't finish doesn't mean the

Perhaps it's worth a little more analysis of MIME's success, since it 
keeps getting held up as a positive example for how we ought to be 
solving the spam problem.  For starters, I think we underestimate Dumb 
Luck -- the many ways that the stars happened to be aligned just right 
for MIME's success.  Without going into a lot of detail, there was a 
momentary convergence of needs, interests, and motivations that simply 
doesn't happen all that often.  (Yeah, MIME was like Woodstock. :-)

Still, chance favors the prepared mind, so I'm writing this in the hope 
that better understanding the MIME story might actually help us be 
ready for the next harmonic convergence.  In the case of MIME the 
prepared mind belonged to Einar Stefferud, who saw fit to introduce me 
and Ned -- semi-prepared minds? -- and suggest that we work together on 
what was then a fairly ill-defined problem.  Although Ned and I proved 
highly compatible, our experience came from vastly different ends of 
the email universe; between the two of us we were able to comprehend 
and integrate a significant fraction of the good ideas offered up by 
what seemed like a whole lot of very smart people (most of whom are 
still on this mailing list) while satisfying the many constraints 
imposed by a complex legacy system with non-binary transport.  In 
cartoon summary, Stef kick-started me and Ned, who then devoted several 
years of our lives to performing what was essentially a 
nearly-exhaustive iterative design process with the entire interested 
community, until nearly everyone was satisfied.  (And remember:  This 
was back when commerce was forbidden on an Internet we would now 
consider microscopic.  So "nearly everyone" could mean "all but one or 
two people.")

The contrast to the present situation is stark.  First, I believe the 
spam problem is orders of magnitude more complex than the problems we 
addressed with MIME.  Second, there are way too many of us.  I don't 
think we had more than 100 people active in the entire development of 
MIME.  Today, we instantly have that many people who want to be active 
on any mailing list we create on the topic of spam.  I'm very proud of 
how hard we worked on MIME, but I don't think any mortal could work 
hard enough to reproduce our approach for solving spam -- Moore's Law 
simply does not apply to the amount of communication a human can do.  
Finally, I'm not sure there's anyone who has yet accumulated enough 
wisdom about spam to provide the right spark to the process, as Stef 
did for MIME, although a lot of us are trying hard to get there.

I consider myself an optimist, because I believe that we will make 
progress against spam, and that there will come a day when you are 
getting, on average, less spam than you did the year before.  I also 
believe that some day humanity will live in peace under a democratic 
and pluralistic world government.  I'm not sure I'll live to see either 
of these goals, but that doesn't mean they're not worth working 
towards.  However, I really think a lot of us need to slow down and 
start planning for a Long Haul.  Someday, I fear, people will be 
getting doctorates in Advanced Spam Studies.  We need to be laying the 
foundations for their future research careers, not looking for a quick 
fix that simply doesn't exist.  -- Nathaniel

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 15:13:21 -0400 (EDT)

There are very good arguments as to why "intellectual property" and
derivatives should be avoided as a term.   One should talk instead about 
patents, copyrights and trademarks instead. The issues represented by the 
three are substantially different among the three and they can't be 
successfully generalized.

To illustrate the inappriateness of the "intellectual property" as a term,
all we have to do is examine the current state of patents, copyrights, and
trademarks:  It is unlikely that Patents are on the way out. It may be
that software patents are on the way out. It may be that biotech patents
are on the way out.  It is unlikely the copyrights are on the way. It may
be that copyright abuse may be limited.  It is unlikely that trademarks
are on the way out.

		--Dean

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