Re: Last Call: Textual Conventions for IPv6 Flow Label to Proposed Standard

[Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>]

    Date:        Tue, 08 Apr 2003 09:46:08 -0400
    From:        "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>
    Message-ID:  <20030408134609.2741B7B4D@berkshire.research.att.com>

  | "send text".  You clearly know what was intended

A better solution would be for that unwritten policy (no contradictory
statements) to just be discarded, and allow the documents to stand
for themselves.   It was that "invented on the fly" nonsense that
I was really having a dig at...

  | -- ISOC has its own copyright,

which most likely covers only the copyright notice (and perhaps other
boilerplate), since copyright on the text itself is never given to ISOC
(no copyright transfers ever take place), just a licence to use the
document (whether even that would be found to be valid I have no idea,
in the unlikely event that anyone ever challenged it, but that doesn't
matter here).

  | but we're not taking a position on an other claims, most 
  | notably patent claims.  What wording do you suggest?

The "no position" could say "on IPR other than copyright" I suppose.

But, if there was no stupid rule about contradictory statements, it
could all be left just like it is, and would never harm anyone.

  | (Changing those 
  | policies is almost certainly not going to happen now, since the ipr wg 
  | seems to be reaching consensus against any significant changes at the 
  | moment.)

I got very busy in the last couple of months of last year, and stopped
reading almost all IETF lists for a while.   My mailer tells me that
I currently have 851 messages to read from the IPR WG.   But because I
had managed to intuit the above conclusion already, and as I believe
that's the right solution anyway, attempting to actually read all of
those messages anytime soon isn't a priority.

kre