ID-Cloud material to ITU

[Jamie Clark <jamie.clark@oasis-open.org>]

Some members asked whether a particular Committee Note Draft from our ID-Cloud TC** can be shared with ITU-T's Study Groups 13 and 17.  The ITU planning group for this work meets shortly; some OASIS members who work in both groups would like confirmation that the OASIS TC material also may be reviewed in their ITU work.

** Cloud Use Cases Version 1.0, Committee Note Draft 01 dated 27 June 2011 (CND01) (http://docs.oasis-open.org/id-cloud/IDCloud-usecases/v1.0/cnd01/IDCloud-usecases-v1.0-cnd01.pdf)

Obviously, there should be no problem in encouraging ITU experts to review the TC's work.  It also should not be a problem if ITU produces inventories of use cases that include and cross-cite to the ID-Cloud TC use cases.  

We do need to make sure that both OASIS and ITU rules for intellectual property are honored.  Both sets of rules exist to make sure that our communities can develop and publish with clear understandings about various rights and claims that may arise in it. Comments from the TC members are welcome:  Here's what we are doing.  

We're bound by the OASIS IPR Policy.  So we can freely permit and welcome ITU review of, and making any normative or nonnormative references they choose to, the TC's work.  However, as a "Committee Note" or "Committee Note Draft", the TC's work will not carry any licensing assurances under our IPR Policy, and is not eligible for "submission" to ITU for purposes of being approved elsewhere.  This is because the committee elected to use a class of work that is excluded from our Liaison Policy on submissions.

The most important purpose of the ID-Cloud TC, and its value to the community (from my perspective), has been to identify and share information on use cases where cloud standards are needed.  So it would be pretty silly to discourage this plan.  We have a long-standing and positive cooperation with ITU, and we're happy to see them thinking about the cloud standards issues raised by your TC's report. 

The TC also has an interest in being sure that its work is used in its final form, and that drafts are not misrepresented as complete. We noted that the TC repository contains an apparently updated version (CNPRD02) at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/45609/IDCloud-usecases-v1.0-cnprd02.zip.  So that's what we will advise the ITU panel to reference.  

ITU-T has its own rules as well.  I'm not sure what their own rules would imply about work that is re-printed, versus referenced by URL.  (Bear in mind that, at OASIS, one can post any link to a document to any TC list ... but if the written work itself is appended to the list as an attachment, that act is taken to be a contribution with licensing consequences.)   So we'll rely on their staff to get that right,  

Obviously, as OASIS, we also selfishly hope to see some of the use case work (which is identified as future needed standardization) occur within OASIS.  Something for us to discuss further with the TC and its members.

We'll confirm to the ITU-T secretariat that we have no objection to members pointing ITU to OASIS TC work generally -- after all, it's in an open repository.  We'll reference the current draft (CNPRD02), and essentially give them reprint permission.  We do that routinely in other appropriate instances as well.  That will include the right to take the OASIS TC use case summary material, along with a link to the OASIS source, and include it in their own roll-up tables of inventories of proposed use cases from multiple organizations. 

We will caution the Secretariat, in our note, that no license rights beyond that are or can be explicitly granted, as we hold no rights from our members to convey more, for artifacts of this class (CN).  (Also, by pointing to the OASIS URL, a reader will land on our document, which contains its own appropriate warnings about what rights are and aren't assured, and how final a draft is or isn't.)   It's our understanding that any derivations or changes that ITU wishes to make from such material, beyond the summary lists/reprints, necessarily would done under their own intellectual property practices, not under any sort of license or permission from OASIS.

Regards  Jamie

James Bryce Clark, General Counsel
OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
http://www.oasis-open.org/who/staff.php#clark

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