Subject: Ah, I see the cause of the situation now... (tls-authz situation)

From: Alex Loret de Mola <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:52:29 -0500

Dear All:

I have received a reply from the Free Software Foundation as to why
they directed comments to this list.

The last call (http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg05617.html)
instructs the public to contact this mailing list in order to express
their comments.

In light of that, I can see how the FSF considered it reasonable to
send public comments this way.

Most notably:

"The IESG is considering approving this draft as a standards track
RFC. The IESG solicits final comments on whether the IETF community
has consensus to publish draft-housley-tls-authz-extns as a proposed
standard. Comments can be sent to ietf at ietf.org or exceptionally to
iesg at ietf.org. Comments should be sent by 2009-02-11."

If the intent wasn't to solicit these kinds of responses, the wording
of last calls may need to be amended in the future, and clarified so
that exactly what is meant by "comments" and if they should actually
be sent to this list.  However, unless an alternative avenue was given
it may degrade the reason why last calls are publicized to begin with.

Even if this situation has happened before, the wording of last calls
does seem to imply that comments are encouraged for the purpose of
determining consensus.  Given that, it seems unfair to have chastised
these people for having done what the message last Call was asking
them to do, even if the people making said comments may not have been
fully versed on the subject.

Hopefully, now that dialog is opened up and the suggestions given to
me to pass to the FSF have been received, they can go through one of
those avenues.  But last calls, if they're not meant to encourage the
kind of response that occurred, should probably be reworded if there
is an alternative place for them to make statements.

Sincerely,

Alex Loret de Mola

---

From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:57:52 -0800 (PST)

To paraphrase you:

"Because these people are clueless and have no idea how the IETF 
works, it is perfectly proper to mislead them with an announcement
with a call-to-action that basically amounts to spam. When they
take such action it's obviously because the IETF doesn't use the
right language."

Give me a break.

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   Mobile: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: [email-masked]  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj

---

From: Alex Loret de Mola <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:12:45 -0500

Dear Ole:

Your paraphrasing assumes many stances that I neither have taken nor
believe, and I'm not certain why my attempts to discern the nature of
how this situation came about is met so frequently with rude
responses.  I think, judging by the harsh tone of your response, that
you may have mistaken the intent of the dialog I've been attempting to
open up.

It assumes that I feel that the individuals posting here were
clueless.  While some likely were, there were also many people who
came here with rational concerns.

It also assumes that I consider this whole situation to be the "fault"
of the IETF because of something tantamount to a linguistic loophole.
First, I am not assessing blame on the IETF: blame implies that some
wrong happened, and even in the most accusatory stances no one could
say that the IETF has done wrong by anyone. I'm merely trying to
determine what brought the situation about in the first place so that
it can be resolved.  Second, the language seems clear enough to me
that the intent of the last call was to receive public comment.  I
don't think that language was an accident: however, I think that if
requesting for public comment is no longer the intent of a last call,
then the language should be changed appropriately.  If either of these
parts were unclear, then I apologize for not having made my response
clear enough.

Like I said before, I'm trying to figure out the cause of the
conflict, and how it can be suitably resolved for the benefit of all
interested parties.

Sincerely,

Alex Loret de Mola

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:29:52 -0500

On 2/10/09 4:12 PM, "Alex Loret de Mola" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> clueless.

*I* feel that the individuals posting here were
largely clueless.  What, the "Reject TLS!" post
didn't raise your eyebrows?

I think the problem here is that the FSF issued
an action alert that contained an awful lot of
misinformation, and its minions did what they were
asked - they posted an "opinion" of a document they
clearly hadn't read.

This was an effort by another organization to get a
large number of IETF nonparticipants to send email
to the IETF.  I understand that we want to encourage
people to be interested in our documents and let
us know what they think but for heaven's sake they
deserve to be dismissed out-of-hand if they haven't
even bothered to read the thing for which they're
trying to block publication.

Melinda

---

From: Alex Loret de Mola <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:48:17 -0500

Dear Melinda (as well as Ole and Noel, who updated with posts while I
was writing this =) ):

I understand your concern, and it concerns me as well.  I'm in a bit
of a delicate situation, attempting to play the role of liason between
us and the FSF (ever since I volunteered for such a duty yesterday),
and since yesterday's events I've been attempting to reconcile what is
reconcilable (if anything is) and send better methods that the FSF can
use to voice its concerns in the future over to them.

Examples like "Reject TLS!" are definitely good examples of ignorant
comments in here, and I'm not attempting to defend that.  But there
were intelligent arguments made as well, and those shouldn't be
ignored just because they originated amidst posts that were less
educated.

The FSF, like I said, seemed to appreciate the gesture we sent to them
when I bundled the alternative recommendations that people sent my
way.  Maybe it will lead to a more productive and less frustrating
approach on their part in the future.

What I don't want to see, however, is intelligent and reasonable
people turned away by the abruptness of the backlash here.  I can
understand the reasons for that abruptness, but intelligent interested
parties and people with a passing (or less) interest are both going to
feel rebuffed and unwelcome if our response is rude.

I've been trying to help this situation, for example, and I've
received a handful of rude comments and dismissals thrown my way just
in doing that.  I don't think anyone deliberately intended to be rude
- they were understandably upset with the situation.  What I'm saying
is that the FSF should consider the alternative methods of bringing up
their concerns that we sent to them, and we should consider a larger
measure of patience and tolerance when these things happen.

And indeed, as Noel said, the idea of adding a link expounding a bit
further about the scope and intent of last call could be one of many
solutions.  The FSF using one of the other, more productive channels
(such as the ones I mentioned in that E-Mail) is another one.

Judging by the FSF's response, it is my hope that they're giving
serious consideration to the alternatives I sent them.  They seemed
appreciative of the information.  Theoretically they could've been
merely patronizing me... but I prefer not to accuse someone of
patronization unless it becomes clear that such is the case.  In that
light, I propose that we give them the benefit of the doubt and see if
they take those more productive routes the next time around.
Certainly it would be in their own best interest as much as it would
be in ours.

Sincerely,

Alex Loret de Mola

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:57:49 -0500

On 2/10/09 4:48 PM, "Alex Loret de Mola" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> people turned away by the abruptness of the backlash here.

I have no idea what you mean by "reasonable and
intelligent."  It seems to me that if they want
to participate in the process, there's always a
big need for people to review documents and provide
input.  If their only interest is in whether or
not the IETF is publishing encumbered material,
that's a lot less helpful.  Not publishing
hostile, false material on their website and
encouraging people to comment on a document they
haven't read would be a start, I think.

> measure of patience and tolerance when these things happen.

I'm guessing you weren't around when the IPR working
group was being chartered and later rechartered.

Anyway, I'd love to see more active participation in
protocol development by people who are actually implementing
stuff.

Melinda

---

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:00:57 -0800

I think Melinda makes a good point here.
 
The fundamental problem with these RMS-grams is that RMS has a longstanding habit of working in write only mode. He makes little or often no effort to determine what the situation is. I have in the past found him entirely interested in responding to enquires as to the purpose of his campaigns.
 
RMS has a certain number of supporters who are willing to write letters. That does not mean that RMS's opinion should hold greater weight than that of other people.
 
As I have argued in the past, the IETF should have an IPR policy precisely because of this type of situation. I do not see why there should be a need to reopen this debate every single time RMS wants to reopen it.
 
I suggest that we first eliminate from consideration all the submissions which make no reference to the specific TLS-Authz document in question. In other words, the one liners of the form 'standards should not have patents' without making any reference to this specific document all go in the bit bucket. If on the other hand it is of the form 'we at the FSF have an implementation that a lot of people use...' then that is different

________________________________

From: [email-masked] on behalf of Melinda Shore
Sent: Tue 2/10/2009 4:29 PM
To: Alex Loret de Mola; Ole Jacobsen
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Ah, I see the cause of the situation now... (tls-authz situation)

Melinda

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Alex Loret de Mola <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:19:42 -0500

Dear Melinda:

By reasonable and intelligent, I mean people who have skills and
expertise that could be useful to the IETF: maybe now, or maybe years
from now.  A person who feels like they've been treated with undue
harshness can hold onto that for quite some time... and that
resentment could turn a person who might help the IETF now or later
into someone who doesn't want anything to do with the IETF.

Again, please remember that I'm not trying to chastise anyone here.
I'm just saying that we should strive to be patient.

And indeed, I don't believe I was around when the IPR working group
was chartered.  I've been a long time watcher, but I hadn't had the
resolve to step forward and say anything in the list until this most
recent situation.  I figured that I might as well try to help calm the
situation in some way.  I'm hoping to be of more use in the future,
especially now that I've finally worked up the courage to post on the
list at all.

Sincerely,

Alex Loret de Mola

---

From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:24:03 -0500

> use to voice its concerns in the future over to them.

FWIW my opinion on this is that

- respect and politness count for a lot (at least for me), and the FSF  
mail bomb was fairly
polite. I would certainly not say that they should be banned (although  
I would suggest that people should be required to join the mailing  
list to post).

- These matters depend on the details a lot. Suppose that a major  
religious figure or a major
movie star encouraged their supporters to email the IETF list. That  
would be a true DOS attack, as it easily might
engender hundreds of thousands of emails. There would be no choice but  
to squelch it. I don't regard the
actual FSF mailing as being in that category. So, I think it has to be  
tolerated, but not encouraged, and gentle suggestions for improvement  
might be useful.

- All of this is orthogonal to the consensus call itself, which as far  
as I can tell has yet to be done in this case. Whoever is making the  
consensus call in this issue will have to, as always, use their  
judgement, and that will include the FSF-generated emails.

Regards
Marshall

---

From: Robinson Tryon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:44:37 -0500

> asked - they posted an "opinion" of a document they

A lot of people fired off a quick email, probably hoping that they'd
have an effect similar to mass-email campaigns to their federal
representatives. By bringing support in numbers, they were trying to
have a meaningful impact to stop the publication of a draft that, to
their limited understanding, was potentially patent-encumbered.

But please remember that a large number of the people who emailed the
IETF list are probably just regular people who use Free Software --
people who often have a daily struggle to try to get their software to
work with proprietary protocols and file formats, and they just saw
this as one more time when another "bad" protocol was going to become
a standard, and then become yet another incompatibility headache for
them and all other Free Software users.

Is this draft document actually going to disrupt end users immensely?
Probably not, but without a much clearer interface to the IETF website
and mailing lists, regular people aren't going to stand a chance of
figuring that out on their own.

> trying to block publication.

I read parts of the document. Then I went to RedPhone's license page
(http://redphonesecurity.com/license.htm) and tried to read their
license -- it's pretty complicated, including language such as
"RedPhone Security will grant royalty-free licenses...to make and use
the Protocol generally, while at the same time retaining certain
rights to...[certain] control methods defined herein." The license
document is beyond the understanding of regular people, and the finer
details of it are probably accessible only to lawyers.

I have to admit that I get a bit lost on the IETF website, too. This
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-housley-tls-authz-extns-07) appears
to be the primary page about the draft standard, however I don't see a
link on that page to IPR disclosures, comments, or legal analysis. If
there could be a single page for a given draft that would include
links to all relevant versions, IPR disclosures, comments on the
draft, etc..., I think that it might be easier for both long term IETF
members and regular people to understand and participate in the
standardization process. If comments were more tightly coupled to
drafts, IETF members could focus on drafts they found interesting and
filter out emails pertaining to drafts in which they held no interest.

While we're talking about confusing websites, RedPhone's license page
lists this link
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/ipr_detail_show.cgi?ipr_id=833)
for their IPR notice. Unfortunately, that entry has been removed from
the IPR tracker, giving a "This IPR disclosure was removed at the
submitter's request" message. Would it be possible to link that entry
to a more recent IPR disclosure such as #1026? (I'm not sure if
they're the same disclosure or not, nor why the content was removed in
the first place if RedPhone is on good terms with the IETF)

As I was one of the participants in the salvo of emails from the FSF,
I do apologize for stuffing your email box with yet one more comment
about patent concerns in the tls-authz draft. I didn't just send off a
canned response -- I researched the situation before sending my email
in, and I'd appreciate it if IETF members took the time to read it. I
hope that in the future the IETF can find ways to be more accessible
to regular users, providing greater education to people about what the
IETF does and how they do it, and obviating the need for mass email
campaigns.

Sincerely,
-- Robinson

---

From: Clint Chaplin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:06:38 -0800

Robinson,

Please stick around.  We could use more people like you, and if you
become more active in IETF discussions and bring your viewpoint in,
we'll be the better for it.

-- 
Clint (JOATMON) Chaplin
Principal Engineer
Corporate Standardization (US)
SISA

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:34:38 -0700

Marshall Eubanks <tme at multicasttech dot com> wrote:

> Suppose that a major religious figure or a major movie star encouraged 
> their supporters to email the IETF list.

I thought Stallman was considered a major religious figure.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://www.ewellic.org
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:01:36 +1300

On 2009-02-11 11:44, Robinson Tryon wrote:
...
> details of it are probably accessible only to lawyers.

I don't think that is specific to this license. They are often
very hard to read, and of course so are the underlying patents.
My view is the IETF's procedures are aimed at avoiding the need to
analyze such legal language within the IETF, but there's no
doubt this is a burden for implementors. However, that's a
political and economic problem, that can hardly be tackled by
pin-pricks applied to a standards community that has to live with
existing law just as much as the free software community does.
> to be the primary page about the draft standard, 

Not really. This being a non-Working Group draft, there's no
WG page to look at. So really you need to look for in the
Internet-Drafts status tracker. Any idiot knows that can be found
at https://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/ ;-)

Let me try that again. It's still hard to find the tracker
if you don't know where to look for it, starting from the
IETF home page. It's actually buried in the IESG Activities page.

So, at the relevant page in the tracker:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/draft-housley-tls-authz-extns/
you can see the whole history of this draft since the original
publication request in April 2006.

> however I don't see a

No, the disclosures have to found separately from the IPR disclosure
page. Actually, adding a link from the tracker to the relevant
disclosures sounds like a Good Idea.

Comments (except for ones in the tracker) have to be found in the
email archives. It's an old gripe of mine that we don't somehow
track all comments on a given draft in a systematic way,
but it's hard to do that when comments arrive with oddball subjects
like "Keep Standards Open", which would defeat pretty much any robotic
sorting.

As already noted, the IETF doesn't do legal analysis. Of course, you
may find some (amateur) legal analysis in the email.

> filter out emails pertaining to drafts in which they held no interest.

That's all true. It turns out to be a pretty challenging IT problem
though. I think your comments are good input for the IETF Tools team.

    Brian

---

From: Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:33:21 +0100

> I thought Stallman was considered a major religious figure.

Only when he wears that hat
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/St._Ignucius

---

From: Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:52:56 +0100

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> [..]
> RMS has a certain number of supporters who are willing to write letters. 
> That does not mean that RMS's opinion should hold greater weight than 
> that of other people.

We must assume that each writer is expressing her or his own opinion, 
not that of some generic leader or employer. Otherwise, how do we 
explain, say, the MARID case?

I'm not a psychohistorian, but I'd guess that if the IETF had been 
fairly immune from interest driven pressures, the FSF wouldn't have 
needed to start that campaign in the first place.