Subject: IEFT RAND policy and Open source community

From: Michael Tiemann <[email-masked]>
Date: 20 Feb 2003 13:19:54 -0500

I am the CTO of Red Hat (www.redhat.com) and sit on the board of the
Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org).  I whole-heartedly endorse
both Larry Rosen as a representative of the open source community as
well as the principles articulated by Eric Raymond.

Since a dichotomy has been drawn between "idealists" and "pragmatists,"
let me as a corporate officer of a publicly traded software company
(NASDAQ:RHAT) attempt to count myself among the pragmatists.  Let me
also say that from my pragmatic seat, the IETF should have the courage
to stand at least as tall as the W3C has on the question of
patent-corrupted standards.  The IETF has achieved remarkable results
due in large part to following sound principles with integrity.  I would
expect that if it continued in this way on the subject of its patent
policy, and publicly identified the inherent difficulty of rationalizing
software patents with standards it recognizes, its influence and the
respect it commands will only continue to grow.

M

_______________________________________________
Ipr-wg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg