Re: [Patents] TODAY/URGENT: Stop IETF Enactment of Patented Standard for TLS

[Benjamin Henrion <bh@udev.org>]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 12:35 AM, Enrico Marocco
<enrico.marocco@telecomitalia.it> wrote:
> Benjamin Henrion wrote:
>> The root of the problem is the IETF policy.
>>
>> This is a good opportunity to show that IETF policy is corrupted by
>> the patent community.
>
> Sure, if people think there's something wrong with the IETF, they are
> always welcome to take part in the discussion and fix it. But an email
> bombing is just an email bombing. What if all of the tens of thousands
> employees of the company I work for started sending emails to FFII's
> mailing lists arguing that s/w patents are good? I suspect that my
> company would just be discredited by that, without achieving any useful
> effect. Now, if you agree with that, just replace "my company" with
> "FSF" and "FFII" with "IETF" and you got what I mean...

Software patents are definitely good for some very few
people/companies, but harmful for the pocket of every consumer.

They are also very well known to exclude free software, free as in free beer.

And if FSF wants to call to some people that there is a danger with
software patents preventing free standards, they are right to do so.

I hope IETF will initiate a reform towards free standards, and stop
issuing standards that not everyone can implement.

--
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403