From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@east.sun.com>
To: cool@lwn.net
Subject: Re: what's your deadline on the ssh thing? 
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 17:07:20 -0500



The IETF as a whole does not take a position on the validity of
intellectual property claims -- see RFC2026, "The Internet Standards
Process", (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2026.txt) and the IETF's page of
IPR notices (http://www.ietf.org/ipr.html).  

The IETF has dozens of working groups.  One of them is the Secure
Shell (SECSH) working group, which was chartered in 1997 or so to
define an internet standard based on Tatu Ylonen's SSH.  [As an aside,
the working group wasn't given the "SSH" abbreviation because, at the
time, the IETF already had a "Site Security Handbook" working group
which had grabbed the SSH abbreviation).  Had the other SSH not been
there, the working group would have been abbreviated as "SSH".]

The original working group chair stepped down over the summer, and I
was asked to take over as working group chair at that time.  Since
then the working group has been making steady progress and we appeared
to be very close to getting a set of documents ready to hand up to the
IESG for review -- we were in the middle of the working group's "Last
Call" period on the core Secure Shell protocol documents when I first
received word of the dispute.

In practice, IETF working groups tend to "engineer around" troublesome
IPR issues; for instance, the SSH version 2 protocol was changed to
use DSS instead of RSA to avoid the (now expired) RSA patent.  I can't
predict how the working group will react to this -- I only know that
it will slow things down.

Needless to say, added delay in the standards process does not help
the end user.

			Bill Sommerfeld
			Working Group Chair, 
			IETF Secure Shell working group.