On Tue, 25 May 2004, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> In message <20040525225350.GB25300@mail>, David Maxwell writes:
> >I think Cisco deserves some bad press as a result of this. Working 'with
> >the community' to develop a fix, and release an RFC as a urgent change
> >to the stack - then declaring it patentable - is deceitful.
> >
> >It does cause an additional amount of work for people who choose to
> >build on top of NetBSD platforms - to keep track of the Patent sticks
> >they can be clubbed with. Perhaps it should be #ifdef'd so that people
> >could avoid using the code.
> >
> >Perhaps, in future, the IETF should refuse to work with Cisco on issues
> >like this one, given this example of how they can be expected to behave.
> There are several problems with your note.  First, the IETF has no 
> problem with patented technology per see; see RFC 3668.  (I'm speaking 
> here as the chair of the IPR working group, which had a strong 
> consensus against changing the IETF's policy on patents.  That said, 

> That said, there is unhappiness in the TCPM working group about this, 
> and they may opt for a different solution.  But the IETF as an 
> organization can accept either outcome here.
> 
> Beyond that, it's not clear that Cisco is patenting the product 
> of the "work with the community".  If they did, they'd be legally 
> obligated to include all of these people as co-inventors, and any one 

I didn't say they were patenting the product of "work with the
community" - I said that they worked with the community (and as you
noted, other people dislike their actions too) got the RFC out, then
declared it patentable.

The issue I have here, is that I believe that any of a number of TCP
saavy individuals could have developed this workaround instead of
someone from Cisco. It seems unlikely that Cisco would have bothered to
patent it, even if they developed it in isolation - but since their name
is on the RFC, they have reason to do so now.

In the general case, I can imagine it just being part of Cisco's
standing policy to patent everything possible, to have ammunition in the
cross-licensing case.

For most commercial entities, that's not a big deal, since they have
patents of their own, and can argue over the comparative values for
cross-licensing purposes.

For open-source entities, it's problematic, because we now have to
choose to EITHER, NOT apply an IETF recommended change, OR encumber our
sources.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
Net Musing #5: Redundancy in a network doesn't mean two of everything and
half the staff to run it.
					      - Tomas T. Peiser, CET