Re: iSCSI: SRP status

[David Jablon <dpj@theworld.com>]

>I, David Jablon wrote:
>>[draft-jablon-speke-00.txt] is careful to not state feelings or legal conclusions,

At 08:31 PM 3/27/02 -0800, Tom Wu wrote:
>After reading the draft, I must respectfully disagree.  Although it doesn't state explicit legal conclusions such as "X is covered by patent Y", it makes statements of opinion like "X uses techniques from Y (which is patented)" or "X is fundamentally different from Y", which, if the reader believes these assertions, leads him/her to a corresponding legal opinion.  I would suggest that opinions w.r.t. IP be struck from the I-D.

Thanks.  I'll review those statements, and look into removing any
opinionated remarks.  However, I think it's important and helpful to
present facts about these methods to assist people in performing
their own analysis.

>>but SPEKE has been openly licensed and deployed for years
>>without using the Lucent patents.
>
>But by that standard, so has SRP.  Has Phoenix (or Integrity Sciences) ever requested any IPR statement from Lucent regarding the EKE patents, similar to what the IPS WG has gone through the last few months?

Frankly, neither myself, Integrity Sciences, Phoenix, or,
as far as I know, any licensees of SPEKE, have seen any need to solicit
an opinion from Lucent in this regard.  All questions that I've heard
of have been resolved by analysis.  And to assist other people who
seek their own answers in this regard, the draft presents relevant facts.

What the IPS WG has done, in openly soliciting companies for opinions,
to confirm or deny rumors, appears to be unusual.
But whether this clarifies the situation, or obscures it, is not
obvious to me.  I think everyone's motives may be suspect.

How a patent holder responds to such a request must be weighed
*very* carefully, as I've mentioned earlier.  One could easily
abuse this process to chop out any targetted technology from any
IETF proposed standard.  If, for example, someone approached, say
Lucent, asking what how they feel about some new Diffie-Hellman-based
proposal, and they refused to answer, what would that mean?
Of if they gave a free license for that, but refused to answer about SPEKE,
which they might view as more of a competetive threat, what would
that mean?  Do we really want to be relying too-heavily on the veto
or blessing of any one person or corporation?

This is why I think it's very important for people to perform their own
analysis, and not rely on rumor, opinion, or too-heavily on the
assertions of any individual or corporation.

>>I'm probably the last person to be lecturing about IETF etiquette
>>in this regard, but I think it is improper to present unsupported feelings
>>and beliefs about patent issues in any standards group discussion.
>>Facts are helpful.  Rumors and unsupported opinion are not.
>
>Are "unsupported opinions" proper/improper in an Internet-Draft, though?

What I said applies to drafts too.
If anyone points out specific language of mine that appears to have
crossed this line, either privately or publicly, I'll definitely look into
correcting it.

-- David