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Thanks Michael. Can you provide more information regarding the “complaints in the re-accreditation challenge” to which you refer. I am familiar with an effort by Qualcomm, Ericsson, Interdigital, Nokia, and possibly other companies that
I don’t recall to cause ANSI to cause ANSI to disaccredit IEEE-SA following the approval of the 2015 updates to the IEEE-SA Patent Policy. As I discussed with your colleague Fabian Gonnell at the time, the effort seemed to be a poor use of the resources of
the companies involved, as it seemed unlikely to me that ANSI would disaccredit one of the standards development organizations that came together way back in the 1920s to form ANSI. But I understand that Qualcomm and other companies have lucrative licensing
businesses to protect, and that has caused your company and others to embark on a campaign disparage IEEE-SA in any number of ways and places.
Parenthetically, it seems to me that campaign to disparage IEEE-SA is something that voters in the upcoming election for IEEE-SA President might want to reflect upon as they choose which candidate to support. It would be great to have
the opportunity to ask the different candidates if they support efforts that Qualcomm and other companies have participated in to disaccredit IEEE-SA at ANSI, but I understand that two of the candidates are actively resisting efforts to organize a candidate
forum at which they could take questions on this topic and others from those who, like me, will soon be called upon to cast ballots in the upcoming election. If you are referring to a different effort to cause ANSI to throw out an accredited standards developer that has participated at ANSI for around a century, then it might be helpful to people considering your comment if you could specify
the nature of that effort, which companies or individuals participated, and what the subject matter was. That would be helpful to me, at least, in considering your comment. Even without that context, I did have one response to your statement below. You seem to be concerned that executing a Contributor License Agreement will cause companies to forfeit rights to license patents for monetary consideration.
I would ask that you consider that this is a door that swings both ways. Participation in standards development in groups that permit RAND licensing force participants to be willing to divert from business models that focus on defensive assertion because
they will need to react to demands for RAND royalties by stating their own demands for RAND compensation, when what they would prefer is to use their portfolios to discourage assertions in the first place while maximizing their freedom to introduce innovative
new products and services. Moreover, as we see in the rising tide of litigation around the 3GPP 4G and 5G wireless standards, the use of RAND seems to engender costly and disruptive disputes over licensing, many of which involve not the innovative companies
like Qualcomm that participate in standards development at IEEE-SA but patent assertion entities, sometimes referred to as “patent trolls”, to which those companies transfer patents they own.
It is the desire to avoid those disputes, in part, that has led to the popularity of fusing open-source licensing and standards development. While not as late as some SDOs in recognizing the importance of welcoming open source, IEEE-SA
is a little behind the curve here, given the emergence of dozens of consortia and fora that use royalty-free licensing models to create widely used standards. W3C, DOCSIS, and the USB Implementers Forum are three examples, but I’m sure we can both think of
others. I recognize that the emergence of open source licensing is a threat to companies with business models based on RAND licensing, and that it is therefore in the interest of Qualcomm and other companies that you have joined with in past efforts
to disaccredit IEEE-SA at ANSI to delay or prevent the efforts at IEEE-SA and elsewhere to provide a process for open source to happen within the (virtual) walls of the Standards Association. Hopefully it will be helpful for others to understand your comment
below in that context, but it would certainly be helpful to them and to me if you could provide more information regarding the ANSI accreditation dispute that you refer to obliquely below. Best regards, Gil From: Michael Atlass <matlass@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Email to IEEE PP-Dialog Regarding the consideration of item 6.3 of the ProCom agenda.
The preamble to the document does not address the items complained of in ANSI. It seems unproductive and perhaps unreasonable for the IEEE to indicate that it has responded via OpsMan adjustments to the complaints in the re-accreditation
challenge when it has not. If the SA feels that it should simply not address those complaints, it should say so rather than suggest that it has done so when it has not.
The distillation to two questions in the preamble is misleading because the objections were not limited to A) clarity about whether there can be multiple OS projects with different licenses and B) that normative dated references are not
permitted or misleading. This distillation is not consistent with complaints described by the complainants. Yet, those two areas are all that is identified in the document for item 6.3 of the ProCom agenda. After reading the complaints, I noted that among the substantive complaint areas highlighted were
1) lack of fairness in balancing the interests of stakeholders interested in contributing to OS projects,
2) imposing as an impediment to participate in OS projects an exclusionary requirement to make royalty free patent grants by executing a CLA, which may include terms that may be contrary to the member’s commitment under an LOA to the IPR
policy (and I observe that OpsMan 6.5.5.2 that appears to be contrary to the requirements of IEEE SA bylaws 6.2),
3) a requirement of adherence to OS license terms that contain commercial terms (contrary to ANSI ER 3.2.1),
4) no ability to opt out of SEP patent license obligations (as per ANSI Guidelines), and
5) inability to share views and objections or additional content into the OS project even when it’s part of the normative elements of the standard, because of the requirement to first execute a CLA with royalty free terms. Best regards, Michael. From:
Dave Ringle <d.ringle@xxxxxxxx> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of
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