OpenID Foundation/Board/Minutes/2007-02-05
These are the approved minutes from the meeting of the 5th Feburary 2007.
Present:
- Martin Atkins (note taker)
- Johannes Ernst
- Dick Hardt
- Scott Kveton
- David Recordon
- Drummond Reed
- Bill Washburn (moderating)
Apologies:
- Artur Bergman (unable to attend due to illness)
Meeting opened at 20:00 UTC
Contents |
Agenda discussion
It is agreed that this meeting is a continuation of the unresolved discussion at the end of the meeting on 1st Feb 2007.
The main topic of this meeting is therefore the IPR concerns raised over the last couple of meetings and on the mailing list.
Procedures for Minutes and Agendas
Johannes motioned that in future we approve previous meeting minutes at the start of each meeting. This was seconded by Drummond.
There was no disagreement from anyone present.
It was also agreed that the board would, via discussion on the mailing list, retroactively prepare the previous minutes for public consumption and vote to approve them in the next meeting on Thursday 8th.
There was some discussion about providing exact transcripts or recordings of calls to the public. There was no agreement reached on whether to proceed with this, however.
We will continue with summary-form minutes for now and come back to this issue later.
The use of Mailing Lists
There was a mailing list vote during over the weekend about making the mailing list public as of Thursday 8th Feb.
This vote was re-counted for the record and those present voted unanimously in support of this motion.
There was some debate about whether the archives should be made retroactively public. It was accepted as a compromise that the archives would not be made immediately public until further discussion had taken place.
Suggested Motions for IPR Policy
Johannes previously posted a set of possible IPR Policy motions on the board mailing list before the call.
The following possible bylaws were listed in the email message:
1a. The OpenID Foundation will conduct its business in a non-discriminatory and meritocratic manner. It will not adopt any policies that give preference to one vendor, user, or other stakeholder over another.
1b. The OpenID Foundation will negotiate with vendors, users, or other stakeholder if and when decided by its board of directors to put bilateral agreements in place that may convey certain benefits to such vendors, users or other stakeholders not available to other vendors, users or other stakeholders.
2a. The members of the OpenID Foundation board are elected by and serve at the pleasure of the OpenID community. The OpenID Foundation shall not adopt any policies that diminish the role of the community in the selection of all board members.
2b. The composition of the OpenID Foundation's board of directors is determined partially by election, and partially by agreement of the OpenID Foundation (as represented by its board of directors) and third parties not subject to community oversight.
3a. It is the objective of the OpenID Foundation that the specifications developed under the OpenID umbrella shall be freely available, implementable and usable by anybody for any purpose. Going forward, all contributors to any OpenID specification process will be required to sign an Open Specification Promise (or materially the same) on their contributions prior to making contributions. No OpenID specifications currently under discussion shall become final until all material contributors to such a specification have signed an OSP.
3b. The OpenID Foundation supports the creation of specifications under a variety of licensing terms (including free availability as well as requiring patent licenses). It shall not adopt any policy that prevents any specification from being adopted solely due to licensing terms placed on it by a contributor to the specification.
4a. While the OpenID Foundation encourages all kinds of innovation around OpenID, (including both free and proprietary), specifications that do not meet the required openness criteria are not appropriate to be worked on under the foundation of the OpenID foundation; proponents of such specifications must find alternate homes from them.
1a vs. 1b
David moved to adopt clause 1a. Drummond seconded.
Those present voted unanimously to accept bylaw 1a.
2a vs. 2b
There was concern that these options for bylaw two covered too many distinct issues to distill it down into two possible choices.
This was declared a "parking lot" issue and deferred pending further discussion on the mailing list and within the community.
A need was also identified to define what is meant by "the OpenID community" in these policies.
3a vs. 3b
David proposed the adoption of clause 3a. Drummond seconded.
It was agreed that the major issue here is what it takes for a specification to be allowed to bear the "OpenID" trademark, and that the two policies should be written more clearly to indicate this.
It was proposed that the statement 3a would be revised to make it clear that:
- The OpenID Foundation is not a standards body
- The OpenID Foundation will check standards for IPR issues before blessing the use of the trademark
- There must be no licencing constraint on any specification which uses the OpenID trademark
David sent a revised version of this policy to the mailing list during the meeting:
3a. It is the objective of the OpenID Foundation that the specifications developed under the OpenID umbrella shall be freely available, implementable and usable by anybody for any purpose. While the OpenID Foundation does not approve specifications, specifications currently under discussion shall not be called final "OpenID" specifications until all material contributors to such a specification have signed an Open Specification Promise (or materially the same).
Dick proposed the adoption David's revised version of policy 3a. Drummond seconded.
All present voted unanimously to adopt the revised policy 3a.
4a
Dick proposed that 4a is now redundant given the modified version of 3a. Drummond Seconded. All agreed.
IPR Concerns
Some members of the board wished to discuss specific concerns they had about IPR and how it relates to the organisations contributing to the specifications.
It was motioned to enter an executive session for this discussion due to the direct discussion of the positions held by specific parties. This was agreed.
David had to leave the meeting at 20:57 UTC but agreed that the meeting could continue in his absense.
The board entered executive session on the topic of IPR Concerns. This started at 21:00 UTC and ended at 21:19 UTC. The details of this discussion are ommitted from the public record.
Mailing Lists and Meeting Procedures
In light of the use of an executive session in this meeting the topics of the procedures surrounding minutes and agendas and the issue of having a public or private mailing list was re-awakened.
It was informally agreed that a board-private mailing list would be added in addition to the current board mailing list. The latter will become publically-readable on Thursday, but its archives will be moved to the board-private list.
The minutes would then be posted and discussed on the new board-private list until approved in the following meeting. Once approved, they will be posted in edited form on the public mailing list.
This was accepted as a temporary operating procedure so as not to stall the progress of the policy of approving minutes with agreement that we would revisit this issue and make a more definite decision at a later date.
