Re: [security-services] Liberty IPR Issues (was: Liberty ID-FF 1. 2submission to the SSTC)

[Michael McIntosh <mikemci@us.ibm.com>]

Eve,

The WSS authors explicitly granted "royalty-free
and other reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions"
for IP they owned that they determined to be required for implementation
of WSS. Since OASIS was standardizing the WSS specification, it was clear
that those terms would apply to the resulting standard produced by OASIS.

So far as I am aware, the Liberty authors
have specified terms for Liberty implementations. The SS TC is generating
a standard for SAML, portions of which will be derived from the Liberty
specification. No definitive statement has been made by the Liberty authors
with respect to licensing terms for SAML implementations. 

I think these are very different licensing
terms. 

Thanks,
Mike

"Eve L. Maler" <eve.maler@sun.com> 11/28/2003 09:30 AM

To:        security-services@lists.oasis-open.org         cc:                 Subject:        Re: [security-services] Liberty IPR Issues (was: Liberty ID-FF 1. 2 submission to the SSTC)

In addition, it's no different from the licensing
terms offered in the 
case of other OASIS contributions.  As an example, here is the relevant
bit from the IPR page of the WSS TC:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wss/ipr.php
"2. Each Author commits to grant a non sub-licenseable, non-transferable
license to third parties, under royalty-free and other reasonable and 
non-discriminatory terms and conditions, to certain of their respective
patent claims that such Author deems necessary to implement required 
portokions [sic] of the WS-Security specification, provided a reciprocal
license is granted."

(I looked at the SPML pages to see if I could find another example since
they supposedly recently had a contribution, but I don't have access the
meeting minutes where the contribution happened, there is nothing on the
IPR page about it, and I can't find the contributed document(s) in the
repository.  Are there no explicit licensing terms for that contribution?)

                
Eve

Conor P. Cahill wrote:

> 
> 
> Michael McIntosh wrote on 11/25/2003, 2:42 PM:
> 
>> Have the OASIS Members that have submitted these specifications
asked 
>> for or received any statements from the other Liberty members
>> regarding their intentions regarding licensing terms for their
IP? Is 
>> it expected (or stated anywhere) that the same terms granted for
>> Liberty implementations will apply to SAML implementations?
> 
> While this looks like a good question, I think that this proactive
> approach is not required by OASIS IPR rules.  In addition, and
perhaps 
> even more importantly,  if someone were to ask me such a question,
I 
> would have to respond with "Show me the derivation and I'll tell
you", 
> especially if I was not participatingg in the SSTC.
> 
> This is, in part, because I can't even tell you if the derivation
will 
> still covered by any IP that I may have and in part that I don't know
if 
> the derivation will include new IP that the current implementation
does 
> not include.
> 
> I think our options in this area are to:
> 
> a) ensure that the 2.0 work remains compliant with the ID-FF submission
> so that it is covered under the existing IPR disclosures.  Note
that 
> this is much easier than if we were to try to work-around any IPR.
> 
> b) once the 2.0 work is done, ask the Liberty folks to "adopt
iit" as 
> part of their next release (which, I can tell you unofficially, is
their 
> intent -- the SSTC is the primary location for further ID-FF work).
> 
> c) Ignore the IPR issues and just include a statement about the IPR
with 
> the 2.0 specs.
> 
> There are, of course, other steps that could be taken, these are just
> the big options that I see.
> 
> Conor
> 
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> 

-- 
Eve Maler                  
                     +1
781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems                
           cell +1 781 354 9441
Web Products, Technologies, and Standards    eve.maler @ sun.com


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