Subject: "technology-rights-01", section 2.2.1 and editorial tirade

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 14:24:00 -0500

Section 2.2.1 of this document seems to repeat a problem of 2026 
that I thought this effort was supposed to solve.  It says:

	2.2.1.  All Contributions
	
	By submission of a contribution, each person actually
	submitting the contribution is deemed to agree to the
	following terms and conditions on their own behalf, on
	behalf of the organizations (if any) the contributor
	represents when submitting the contribution and on behalf
   [...]
	If the contribution is an Internet Draft this agreement
	must be acknowledged by including in the header of the
	contribution one of the statements in section 3.2 of
	[IETF SUB].

But section 3.2 of "submission-rights" contains our old friends, 
the I-D introductory boilerplate statements.  And those 
statements are about copyright; they say absolutely nothing 
about patents or other technology rights.  If we need a 
statement to the effect of "by submitting this I-D, I certify 
that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which I am 
aware have been disclosed in accordance with RFC XXXX", then we 
should require it (whether that is a clarification or a change 
is left as an exercise for the co-chairs and AD).  But pointing 
to the insertion of copyright statements as acknowledging the 
obligation to disclose technology IPR seems to me like an 
invitation to more confusion.

Maybe it should refer to section 4 of this (the technology 
rights) document, but see separate note on that section.

I also believe it would be undesirable to last-call this 
document without considerable additional editorial work.  See 
the rant below and the explanation that follows it.

<rant>

This document appears to need a good deal of copy-editing. 
Spaces appear in front of commas, plural verbs are used with 
singular subjects, singular pronouns are used to refer to plural 
antecedents and so on.  The "if you would like" tone of the last 
paragraph of section 1 is inconsistent with the style of the 
rest of the document.

On a slightly more substantive note (but still copy-editing 
rather than really substantive... I hope) there are also places, 
such as the last sentence of section 3(A), where I believe it 
would be better to replace "rights" by "claims".  If the IETF is 
not going to evaluate these things (as 3(B) specifies), 
statements in this document and in the note required earlier in 
the paragraph should not even imply that we acknowledge any 
"rights" -- we are simply reporting the fact that the claim has 
been made.  I claim this is simply a matter of correct 
presentation, in English, of what we are doing, but I suspect 
that the change may be desirable from a legal standpoint as well.

Section 3(A) and 3.1 are slightly inconsistent: 3(A) appears 
that there be an explicit statement that the IPR provisions have 
been exercised as part of advancing a document, while 3.1 
indicates that the existence of independent implementations 
causes presumption that they have been exercised.  I prefer the 
former and hope it is the current practice since the practice of 
patent cross-licensing arrangements among companies makes it 
quite possible that two independent implementations would come 
into being without exercising any provisions that would apply 
across the IETF.

Burying definitions in section 5, between a pair of substantive 
sections, even with a table of contents, is not normally how we 
do documents.  If definitions are important, we put them up 
front.

The combination of "which includes... that meets... which is 
reasonably" in the first paragraph of 6.1.1 is hard to follow 
and can possibly be read in different ways.  And the last 
sentence of that paragraph contains an effective double-negative 
-- best avoided, especially when the document will be read by 
non-native speakers of English.

If this document were code, the forward and backward references, 
especially to and within section 6, would get it a 
spaghetti-threading award.  IETF should not covet such awards in 
its procedural documents.

There is more.

</rant>

Under normal circumstances, I would view most of the items in 
the "rant" section as editorial remarks and just send them 
privately to the editor.  Because that is also the usual IETF 
custom, I apologize to Scott for beating him up in public. 
However, the purpose of this WG and this document is to clarify 
one that, from experience, is not crystal-clear.  Replacing one 
of its sections with a much longer document that is not 
absolutely clear, that adds new burdens to people preparing 
contributions (see next note), and that can be read to be 
internally inconsistent strikes me as a _really_ bad idea.  And 
that problem is one to which I believe every participant in the 
WG needs to be sensitive.  Whether one agrees with the document 
or not, if its intent and rules are not completely clear (to 
both engineers and lawyers), then we are walking into big 
trouble.

Given that situation, it is, IMO, important that whatever 
version of this document (and of "submission-rights") is 
last-called be finished, editorially as well as in general 
intent.  I continue to attribute most of the problems of delays 
and document changes out o the sight of WGs to the fashion in 
which the IESG and the RFC Editor have been working on 
post-last-call documents internally and with each other.  But I 
think it is clear to anyone who has watched the process closely 
in the last few years that an important document that contains 
editorial and consistency errors is an invitation to an orgy of 
nit-picking and private negotiations.  Precisely because the 
_language_ of these documents is as important as their intent 
(especially since a condition for this WG essentially involves 
accepting the intent and current interpretations of 2026), I 
would hope that we not hand off something to the IESG unless we 
have general agreement that it is finished and understandable.

regards,
    john

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