Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: IP: Microsoft breaks Mime specification

From: "Kyle Lussier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 08:53:12 -0800

> > I'm sure many companies would bid to be the one to distribute or revoke
> > "IETF certified" trademarks. They would come up with a fair and open
> > certification process...
> 
> Can we suspend this thread until these 'many companies' step forward
> with their proposed fair and open certification (and *de*-certification)
> processes?

I'm a strong proponent of the "one true mark", easy-in, no hassles.
With strong, but forgiving enforcement policies.

That's the only way I see to do it, not to mention, if it's cheap
and easy, lots of people will do it, and you would generate a
$10m legal fund so that it had some teeth.

Kyle Lussier
AutoNOC LLC

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 13:37:05 -0500

> $10m legal fund so that it had some teeth.

Are you that sure that there are 100,000 seperate products that would want
to have the logo attached to them, and willing to pay $100 for it?

/Valdis

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From: Peter Deutsch <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 12:20:05 -0800

g'day,

Kyle Lussier wrote:
. . . 
> $10m legal fund so that it had some teeth.

Now you're just getting silly. Let's see, you propose a fee of $100 per
registration (presumably you intend a registration per product, and not a
registration per company). Hmm, $10,000,000 divided by $100, that's 100,000
networking products registered. So what percentage of all networking products
will get registered? Presumably not all of them, so you're assuming something
well north of 100,000 commercially viable networking products are out there?
Sounds a bit high to me.

Presumably you've factored out all the non-commercial freeware, shareware and
such stuff, since I can't see too many authors of such stuff giving away their
labour *and* poneying up $100 for an IETF logo if they haven't bothered in most
cases to send money to the Richard Stallman.

And for those products left, do you charge for each release of a product? Each
patch release?

And is this a one time fee, or an annual fee? If one-time, the first lawsuit
could wipe out your reserves, even if you win, so your contract with vendors had
better have a clause letting you go back to the well whenever you need it. How
many people would sign up for such recurring, unbounded fees? 

This all sounds like you're being a tad fluffy on the business side here...

But the biggest problem here is that you've just created a $10M annual cashflow
for the IETF to manage. This would be a massive infusion of cash for an entity
that today runs on cookies and good will. Do you really think that you can put
$10M (or gosh forbid, $10M *a year*) into a bank account without it starting to
attract attention? History tells us it would immediately generate its own
infrastructure to consume it (have you looked over at the DNS world recently?)

Try for a moment to image the new class of problems this will entail for the
IETF (and the new class of people who would show up for the "budgeting and
cashflow management working group") if the IETF was suddenly worth $10M a year.
Remember the old curse "be careful what you ask for, in case you actually get
it"...

Forget the technical merits of what you're proposing for a moment (because a
number of people have already pointed out that it's "interoperability", NOT
"compliance" that people actually care about. To assume otherwise is to assume
an omnipotence about what gets done at the IETF that isn't justified by the
historical record). Your problem here is that your business case seems to fail
the smell test.

But, hey if you really feel this has merit, I encourage you to go off for a
while and work up the details. But be *really* specific. Personally I'm
particularly interested in your business plan because after all, you're asking
for at least $10M and the market has been down for the past year. If you can
build a business that generates $10M a year with *this* idea, it would suggest
that the downturn is finally over...

So please include some market research on your numbers. I'd also like to see the
detailed proposals outlining your processes, and I'd like to the names and fee
schedules for the lawyers you've hired to vet all this. And finally, if you can
work in seven layers somewhere I'd be willing to resurrect some old T-shirts
from the early nineties for you, back from before people started taking the IETF
this seriously...

				- peterd

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