Simon Josefsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Please explain to them why their behavior frustrate the Debian > community. (But stop your blood from boiling first...)
If you have the time, please go and do it. IETF have been broken awhile and I do not believe they are ignorant that:- * it is not necessary to give permission for "unrestricted derivative works" to be includeable(?) in free software; * confusion over what is the standard can obviously be avoided by use of signatures and/or by naming requirements; because * the "unrestricted" argument is attributed to unspecified messages from unnamed persons on a mailing list; * Debian Developer Sam Hartman is referenced, who was involved with the need for modification permission on RFCs before, so I expect the DFSG have been explained; * non-IETF changes are described as "capricious"; * majority rule is appealed to; * Larry Rosen is mentioned; * Scott Bradner has written in Network Week in favour of the scrutiny that "open source" gets, but derided modifiability; * Scott Bradner appears to hold a software patent; * it fits with my experience of recent IETF actions. > Don't attribute to malice, what can be explained by ignorance, and all > that. As explained above, I wouldn't be sincere if I tried to participate on that basis right now. I think that some IETF participants would be quite happy to harm debian. > Some highly involved people in the IETF IPR WG have claimed they were > not aware of the problems the IETF legal conditions create for the > free software community. Since RFC have not been included in Debian > for a long time (forever?), I had assumed that this had been discussed > with the IETF earlier. Given the ignorance, that may not have been > the case. (More information on that would be useful, btw.) http://bugs.debian.org/92810 has some background, including the maintainer refusing to contact upstream about it. > If we explain the problem to the IPR WG, and they pursue similar poor > conditions, it will become clear that the IETF do not care about the > free software community. Then we can formalize our own > standardization mechanism, without feeling a moral commitment to > sharing the work with the IETF. Yes, that's one way out of this hole, but it's not without a lot of work and a lot of risk. :-( -- MJR/slef http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
