Re: SACRED meeting minutes for 53rd IETF

Alfred,

There are a few things that should be amended in the first draft of the
minutes excerpted below.

A few of us have had some private discussion on these points, but
I believe these should also be publicly noted, as the SACRED mailing
list includes many who did not attend the meeting.

First, the statement about the IAB and patent issues was poorly worded,
and should be completely ignored until restated.

Second, the Schiller objection to at least some aspect of the Jablon
presentation was (and remains) a contentious point.  However, to be fair,
it should be noted that Jeff saved his comment until what seemed
(to me) to be the natural end of discussion, and it did not appear to
preempt much discussion, as might be implied from the first draft minutes.

Third, the phrase:
        -- which might be available under "more reasonable" terms. --
has quote marks which seem to imply that those were my exact words.
I do not recall that statement, or making any statement about specific
license terms or any general characterization of such terms.
I know I said that one should pose certain questions directly to owners of
potentially relevant patents and that this should be done specifically because
certain things are not appropriate for discussion in an IETF meeting.

I know that patents are an extremely sensitive issue for this or any IETF WG.
I strived to present material that I believed to be directly relevant to both
the SACRED WG's technical goals and their concerns about relevant patents.
I just saw no way to present this material without also stating that my company
is a source of patents in this regard, as required by fairness and IETF rules.
If anyone has any problem with the way this material was presented,
please let me know.

Thanks.

-- David

At 09:43 PM 3/20/02 -0500, Alfred Arsenault wrote:
>Folks, 
>
>        Below are the draft minutes from Monday's SACRED WG meeting.  Any foul-ups in these are mine; please let me know if there are any omissions, additions or mis-attributions to be corrected.  If there are no comments/objections, these will stand as the meeting minutes.
>
>        Thanks, 
>
>                        Al Arsenault 
>_____________________________________________________________________ 
>Meeting minutes - SACRED Working Group meeting, 53rd IETF, Minneapolis, MN 
>Meeting Chair:  Magnus Nystrom, RSA Security.  (Co-chair Stephen Farrell missed the meeting for personal reasons.) 

[...]

>Magnus noted that the Protocol document has a dependency on SASL-SRP draft, so it can't actually be published as an RFC until after that document is done. Magnus asked if anyone had any insights into the progression of the SASL-SRP draft.  Lawrence Greenfield said that the last he knew, there were no outstanding issues on that draft, and he has no real idea what's holding it up.  Thus, it's possible that the block from SASL-SRP will soon be removed.

[...]

>Bob Morgan noted that there might be IPR concerns around SRP that could hold this work up.  Jeff Schiller said that the IPR situation around SRP is "a mess".  IAB is now looking at ways to avoid SRP, EKE, and similar technologies that could be covered by patents and may hold up work.
>
>Dave Jablon took that opportunity to stand up and give a quick presentation on draft-jablon-speke-00.txt.  This individual I-D covers, among other things, SPEKE.  SPEKE is a competing authenticating technology patented by Phoenix Technologies, which might be available under "more reasonable" licensing terms.  Jeff Schiller stated that it was inappropriate for Dave to be soliciting business in this manner, and discussion essentially ceased on this issue at that time.  The issue of encumbered authentication technologies remains unsolved. 
>
>The meeting ended at 1400.