[OpenID board] IPR Policy and Process Proposal

[Drummond Reed]

Dick,

 

RE the IPR Policy, Blanket Reciprocity term, I don't think you give a
license for anything other than the Necessary Claims you contribute. The
issue is that if you sue another Contributor for ANYTHING - even something
totally unrelated to OpenID - you lose the license they have provided to any
Necessary Claims they contributed.

 

See the suggestion in the Blanket Reciprocity open issue section for a
simple way to fix that.

 

RE the formal process, I agree that essentially it's a very lightweight
standards process. Call it a community process. But if you read Gabe's
proposal closely, the full skeleton is there. Voting (which would take place
directly on the lists), membership (which involves only membership on the
lists), governance (which is this process doc itself) is all covered - it's
all just very lightweight. 

 

Overall, if the choice at this point in time comes down to putting in place
"just enough process" for the OpenID community to have its own lightweight
process vs. being forced to move the specs to a full-blown SDO, I'd prefer
the former.

 

How do the rest of the board members feel?

 

=Drummond 

 

  _____  

From: board-bounces at openid.net [mailto:board-bounces at openid.net] On Behalf
Of Dick Hardt
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 4:27 PM
To: board at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID board] IPR Policy and Process Proposal

 

I have concerns with both documents:

 

Formal IPR Policy:

http://openid.net/wiki/index.php/Formal_IPR_Policy

 

Blanket Reciprocity term -- Sxip has significant Patents in this space and
just giving all those patents that are not needed for implementing OpenID to
any Contributor is a challenging issue for us and I would imagine a
non-starter for large organizations. Perhaps I am missing something about
the intent of this term

 

Formal Process:

http://openid.net/wiki/index.php/Formal_Process

 

This is looking like the basis for a standards body now. I thought we had
decided that we would move the specifications to a standards body so that we
did not have to reinvent the wheel? Voting, membership, governance are big
issues that are not defined in this  document -- so even though it looks
complex now, wait until those issues are dealt with!

 

On 23-Apr-07, at 9:08 PM, Gabe Wachob wrote:





There's now a "there" there. 

 

Thanks to some prodding from Mike Jones, we had a spurt of activity this
weekend (some of you have been cc'd on emails, some of you are blissfully
ignorant). 




The result is the following:

 

1)       Everyone (including esp Microsoft) would like to be able to close
this IPR policy by IIW - that's aggressive, but everyone seems aligned

2)       There's a relatively concrete proposal for an IPR policy and
lightweight process to enable that policy at
http://openid.net/wiki/index.php/Formal_IPR_Policy and
http://openid.net/wiki/index.php/Formal_Process  respectively

3)       I'm sure there will be some pushback as this is no small feat
getting grassroots and big organizations to play in the same IPR sandbox. On
the other hand, the IPR policy proposed by MS functionally equivalent in
most of the big ways to the OSP, so things may go smoothly. There are
outstanding questions, etc from Johannes and myself - however, I don't
consider my pushback to be all that critical and certainly not worth holding
up the process. 

4)       There's been agreement among several of us to set up
legal at openid.net - if someone opposes this (yet another list),  please speak
up. However, I think this is a truly distinct topic that is not going to
attract the broad-base of interest that issues like security might have. In
any case, we obviously need to move this discussion to the community. 

5)       We need to do some outreach to get some legal (and related) advice
and input from other large organizations who are most interested in the IPR
policy - I think between the board here we know all the relevant lawyers and
opinionated people out there. My connections are with EFF and Berkeley
people, and some open source folks. 

6)       I will also post to the wiki a proposed plan for moving this
forward very quickly. 

7)       Did I mention already we want to get this done by IIW? ;-)

 

-Gabe

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