From: Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. [mailto:amitchell@xxxxxxxxx] Most importantly, I believe, and a point I perhaps did not highlight pointedly enough, is this: the lawyers and suits are the corporate decision-makers. They generally do *not* take the concerns of the technical people into account when making either legal or other corporate decisions.
I don't recall ever having a lawyer advise me to take a particular course of action for anything other than purely defensive reasons.
Lawyers are rarely true decisions makers for that very reason, give them four alternative choices for action and they will provide you with reasons against five of them.
It is in this climate that people in this group are saying "but someone who has intellectual property rights to this would _never_ do that, because it would be wrong - or would not be the best for the Internet". That's horribly naive.
It depends who, you can usually depend on parties to follow their own best interests. In the case of the largest computer compaines that generally means the industry interest as well.
When it comes to the behemoths we are discussing whether or not we should risk them acquiring one extra missile, and not a particularly reliableone at that. This would worry me rather more if it wasn't for the fact that they already own more than enough missiles to ensure complete destruction if they go the nuclear route.
Their motive for wanting a product to be deployed is _very_ different than your motive. It has to do with marketshare, consumer capture and retention, or, at best, a solution to _their own problem_. This is true of *any* company, even primarily anti-spam companies, which have moved from garage to office suite, and *particularly* true of those which have moved from "a few guys doing something they care deeply about" to investors and shareholders.
The folk who have recently moved from garage to VC funded startups are actually a much bigger threat, they have no corporate interest in the commons. The established players do.
My point, and I do have one, is that the lawyers and suits need to have an epiphany, and need to realize that this is a situation which is turned on its head from what they are used to - that not only do they have to take the concerns of the Geek Front into account - but that without the Geek Front they've got nothing.
Its called mindshare. A case in point is S/MIME vs PGP. The format dispute is an irrelevance from a technical point of view, but the failure of S/MIME to build a deployment constituency and the failure of PGP to gain industry support has meant that neither has been a success.
The problem we have here is that the process was only designed to address the technical issues. It is quite possible to go from start to finish without having built the necessary constituency for deployment.
Phill