Wednesday, 24 January 2007

IETF, open source and the Internet under attack

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David Berlind, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite columnists, writes about the efforts of Larry Rosen in regards to the Internet Engineering Task Force. IETF is the standards body that holds the spec on IMAP, SMTP and many other Internet standards.

Generally, the Internet standards that you use are free of patent encumbrances. This has allowed them wide adoption in both open source and proprietary software. Your browser communicates nicely with this open source blogging software running on an open source application server as well as IBM.com presumably running on WebSphere. It is Royalty-Free standards that have driven the tremendous growth of the Internet. However a select group of patent-rich companies with short-sighted views of the world have continually tried to get standards bodies to switch to "RAND" (reasonable and non-discriminatory...which under NDA is up to the patent-holder to decided what is reasonable and non-discriminatory) and other even less equitable policies (in the case of IETF).

Additionally, there has been some discussion on the license-discuss list at OSI about how these patents are even disclosed. If I understand correctly, it is even worse than Mr. Berlind describes, it sounds like in the "MUST" section of an IETF RFC you can reference "something else" which might allow you to require implementors to implement a patented technology, yet you can probably *not* disclose the patent. Since patent searches are expensive, in part because the patent office has a horrible database index system, this could make a great business for someone at the expense of the rest of us. It is a great scam no?

on the Adware vs Open Source front

Meanwhile, TheServerSide has a long discussion about Terracotta's claim to be open source. I'm concluding my efforts at OSI to formalize the arguments against Social Text's adware license provision submission. You can read the draft and participate in the discussion. If socialtext does not revise their license (which has sentence structural issues) then I plan to "formally" submit this to the board next Tuesday. The paper also contains links to help you acquaint yourself with the issue of "badgeware" aka "adware" which inaccurately is sometimes referred to as "attribution" (though that confuses the issue with more innocuous BSDish licensing).

A similar controversy does not exist in Free Software as there is a clear stance against "advertising clauses" which goes well beyond open source. Meldware uses a license that is both Free and Open Source.

UPDATE

Ross Mayfield, of Socialtext, writes: