Subject: Re: How IETF treats contributors

From: "william(at)elan.net" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 00:53:41 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, Dean Anderson wrote:

> This is a personal message, and doesn't qualify as being published. You
> mentioned that you failed to follow up.  That may be true. And that's why
> you shouldn't be credited for originating the idea, and why David Green
> and later Hadmut Danisch should be credited.  They did the work, and
> unlike you, took it to the IETF, and published it first.  What you did in
> secret is irrelevant. You should have published it.
>
> That's just your oversight.  However, the Namedroppers archives show that
> you __replied__ to Green's proposal. He was __first__ to publish.  Maybe
> you had Miller's draft in the wings since 1997. But you didn't get it it
> first.

To be able to claim that somebody first discovered it, the person would 
have to either file a patent (and have patent filing date prior to when 
the idea is first discussed on introduced in public) or to actually post 
an idea in public forum (either internet or journal, etc). So I hate to 
say it, but it looks like Dean Anderson is right and based on the facts 
presented David Green should be credited as first person that introduced 
what is now being developed by MARID.

I recommend MARID chairs or authors of the drafts make an appropriate 
changes to the Acknoledgement section of both core and protocol drafts, 
something like this (text mostly combination of what was in protocol
and core acknoledgements sections):

   This design is based on earlier work published in 2003 in [RMX] and 
   [DMP] drafts (by Hadmut Danisch and Gordon Fecyk respectively). 
   The idea of using a DNS record to check the legitimacy of an email 
   address traces its ancestry to "Repudiating Mail-From" draft by Paul 
   Vixie [Vixie] (based on suggestion by Jim Miller) and to
   "Domain-Authorized SMTP Mail" draft by David Green [Green] who first 
   introduced this idea on namedroppes maillist in 2002.

With references as follows:
 [Green] http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/namedroppers/msg01636.html
 [Vixie] http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/namedroppers/msg01638.html

And these acknolidgements should probably be the same for both 
marid-protocol and marid-core drafts. Although protocol can list 
additional people who contributed to design of SPF while marid-core
may list those who contributed to caller-id.

P.S. While the original thread started was more general question on
"How IETF treats contributors", this has now become a discussion that
is very particular to MARID WG documents. I think it might be appropriate 
that those wishing to participate and discuss futher what acknolidgement 
section of MARID drafts should say, should do it on MARID mail list, 
rather then on IETF general list, especially since only discussions there 
would count and we are already on the last week of "Last Call" on these 
drafts. Please see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/marid-charter.html
for information on how to participate in this WG to discuss these documents.

I also would like to urge other IETF participants to look at some of the 
latest archives as we're discussing number of problems with these drafts 
and its important for WG chairs to hear from wide audience as to if we
should proceed considering how many problems have been found already.
Of great importance are also issues due to IPR claimed by Microsoft for 
something that many on the list said is obvious derivitive from RFC2822. 
Microsoft also provided license which is overly restrictive and would not 
allow to support new protocol by any software that is licensed under GNU 
or simular public source licenses and this has raised questions as to if 
we should proceed futher with these drafts considering possibility that 
protocol may not be adapted by large portion of internet community.

---
William Leibzon, Elan Networks:
 mailto: [email-masked]
Anti-Spam Research Worksite:
 http://www.elan.net/~william/asrg/

---

From: "Jim Lyon" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 07:08:17 -0700

> may list those who contributed to caller-id.

I would be happy to do this in the next draft of -core.

-- Jim Lyon