draft IPR comments for final approval

[Lofton Henderson <lofton@rockynet.com>]

WebCGM TC members,

This concerns the new-IPR-policy comments that the TC will submit this 
week.  The first one (below) has already been approved in principal by the 
TC at last telecon -- #1 below is just the exact proposed wording.

#2 below is new.  The SC thinks that perhaps we ought to support the 
suggested 4th mode.  Please have a quick look at the linked message.  I 
think it raises a good point, and from my experience working with NIST, I 
know that government entities indeed need such terms.  The interesting 
question is:  do we (WebCGM TC) need them?  Does this affect us?  On the 
one hand, one might say this is how we have been working (implicitly).  On 
the other hand, perhaps the "implicit" actually means that we have just 
been careless about specifying our mode and terms.

I'm not sure which is correct.  What do you think about #2 (submit it, 
modify it, forget it)?  Dave will put this on Wednesday agenda for brief 
discussion.

-Lofton
(preparing draft text for Dave)

1.) Changes affecting Individual Membership
=====

The CGM Open WebCGM TC is unanimously opposed to the proposed rule 
eliminating TC participation of individual members employed by a company 
that owns their IP.  It apparently would affect two CGM Open people.

While the WebCGM TC supports the goals of ensuring that Contributions have 
clear licensing obligations and that licenses are available for all OASIS 
Standards and specifications, we think that goals be achieved in other, 
less drastic ways than the proposed new IPR policy.  A number of 
interesting and workable ideas are suggested in the ipr-comments threads on 
the topic, starting approximately at [1].

[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ipr-member-review/200408/msg00003.html

2.) No-IPR mode
=====

The CGM Open WebCGM TC has some sympathy with the points made in [2], that 
OASIS would benefit from a fourth IPR mode, which is essentially "no IPR 
claims attached".  Although we could probably function okay in one of the 
RF modes, a no-IPR mode seems to match the mode in which CGM Open has 
implicitly worked historically.  We would like to hear what the OASIS IPR 
team has to say about such a mode.

[2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/ipr-member-review/200408/msg00019.html

Regards,
David Cruikshank
Chair, CGM Open WebCGM TC