Sam, Since you mention AMQP, yes the whole thing is based on patent grants royalty free, from inventors, to implementers and users. This is similar to but stronger than how the W3C deals with patent grants (which I take it is why you bring up RAND). So I am not sure what your point is about having a business model that is incompatible with something. Nonetheless it is not at all obvious to me why the IETF is not a perfectly good model for internet protocols. And the IETF license is very explicit about patent grants not being made. In any case, the issue of which licensed works the OGF may derive work from, is a question for the OGF. alexis On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Sam Johnston <samj@samj.net> wrote:
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Alexis Richardson <alexis.richardson@gmail.com> wrote:
If the IETF are happy with it, then I am.
I hate to be the one to break it to you but even RAND is completely and utterly incompatible with your business model as well as those of many of the participants on this list. Are you sure AMQP doesn't tread on any patents, possibly "conveniently overlooked" by your competitors? Need I remind you of the OpenSEMP debacle at the CCIF goat rodeo?
The patents that litter the IP wasteland are like land mines - if we fail to exercise our duty of care to our users and end up stepping on one then the licensing fees will be determined by lawsuits, not "reasonable and non-descriminatory" fees (which typically only apply to large scale standards like MP3).
I'm surprised this topic was deemed worthy of discussion... if we were doing something hard like standardising autonomic scaling algorithms then fair enough, but we're not.
Sam