RE: [idn] NSI Multilingual Testbed Information (fwd)

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 12:33 PM -0400 8/26/00, J. William Semich wrote:
>I would have thought that you might have
>noticed the inclusiveness of the very general first claim...

I did notice it, and I believe that it is subject to lots of obvious 
prior art. You might disagree.

>I don't know what your attorney said to you...

I never claimed to have spoken to an attorney about this; maybe you 
are mistaking me for James.

>Since we are using UTF-8 for NUBIND and other implementations of
>multilingual services in our system, this patent does not affect the NUBIND
>and related IDN implementations.

The fact that raw UTF-8 sent to applications does not work with a 
myriad of Internet protocols might affect your choice as well.

>I expect that is also exactly why Microsoft and the Mozilla/Netscape group
>have built UTF-8 into their browsers' URL encoding mechanisms as well -
>following the current IETF (and W3C?) standard.

Unless you were part of either team who did the implementations, some 
people might consider it improper for you to speak for them. There 
are lots of other reasons why they might have done so, and it is very 
likely that the reason one company did it is quite different than the 
reason the other company did. Further, UTF-8 is a standard for a 
single *encoding*, not for every possible *payload* on the wire. 
There is a huge difference between the two, and that difference is 
the crux of the discussion of this Working Group.

>I'd be surprised if
>Microsoft or TimeWarner/AOL/Netscape would be willing to migrate their
>browsers to an ACE at this point, especially facing the possibility of a
>claim from Pouflis. But since I'm sure both companies have someone in this
>WG, perhaps they'd care to comment on the issue?

You may find it surprising to hear that Microsoft and Netscape are 
strongly committed to following IETF standards, but many of us are 
not. As director of the Internet Mail Consortium, of which both 
Microsoft and Netscape (and IBM, and Sun, ...) have been members for 
over four years, I can assure you that they have lived up to such a 
commitment, even when it is very painful for them. For example, few 
people at Microsoft wanted to migrate from their well-liked but 
proprietary mail protocols to SMTP and IMAP, but they did so 
wholeheartedly when their customers demanded it. And their commitment 
doesn't end at simply implementing the IETF standards. These 
companies regularly attend interoperability workshops to test how 
well they have met the various IETF standards, and they regularly 
revise their mail client and server software when they find that they 
are doing things in a non-standard fashion. Further, these companies 
regularly participate in IETF WGs that are creating new standards, 
even though that means that they will have to update their software 
when the new standards come out. It would be wonderful if all other 
vendors had this much commitment to the IETF standards process.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium