Subject: [Cellar] Special agenda requests for our October meeting?

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2021 14:55:00 -0500

Dear  Folk,

Michael and I are both seeing a lot of discussion on FLAC and on Matroska
in Github.

Ordinarily, we would go through high-priority issues that have been raised
on the mailing list, and then just go through issues in various GitHub
repos.

Is there anything that we should start off with, for next Tuesday's
meeting?

Best,

Spencer

---

From: Reto Kromer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2021 13:44:48 +0200

Spencer Dawkins at IETF wrote:

>Is there anything that we should start off with, for next
>Tuesday's meeting?

The progress on the GitHub repository should allow Dave upload a
new draft on the 24th, as he volunteered to do.

Kind regards, Reto

---

From: Martijn van Beurden <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 09:52:06 +0200

Op wo 20 okt. 2021 om 21:56 schreef Spencer Dawkins at IETF
<[email-masked]>:
>
> Is there anything that we should start off with, for next Tuesday's meeting?
>

Not high-priority nor necessarily something to start off with, but
perhaps it is a good idea to talk about copyright issues on the FLAC
specification. It was mentioned in the last meeting as well, but I am
quite concerned with it. The problem is that I haven't heard anything
from the original author of FLAC for almost 10 years now: not on any
mailing list, forum, git/svn/cvs.

I don't know what happened, but his last commit to a repository was in
October 2009. The new maintainer said that he was 'missing' in Febuary
2012: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2012-February/003083.html
In April 2012 he surfaced again:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2012-April/003340.html for a
month, disappearing again presumably after this mail:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2012-May/003384.html It
seemed nobody was able to contact him:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2012-December/003522.html

The only recent sign of life I can find is that his Hydrogenaud.io
forum profile (jcoalson) was last active about a year ago. Perhaps
some of the people at Xiph know how he can be contacted?

Rewording the specification to avoid copyright issues is not that
hard, but I feel that it would be nice to incorporate the original
author as well, if possible.

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 14:44:28 -0400

> mailing list, forum, git/svn/cvs.

The document was uploaded to the ietf.org datatracker.
The copyright issues were essentially assigned at that point.
If you are saying that whomever did that upload did not have authorization to
do so, then maybe that's an issue.

When you talk about "original author", are you talking about the code, or the
document?

    > http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/2012-December/003522.html

That all sounds like software, rather than specification.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Martijn van Beurden <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 21:11:19 +0200

> When you talk about "original author", are you talking about the code, or the

I'm specifically talking about the document. It can be found here:
https://xiph.org/flac/format.html. It is licensed under GNU FDL. Based
on data available in git, it is reasonable to assume the copyright is
be almost exclusively with Josh Coalson as I argued here:
https://github.com/ietf-wg-cellar/flac-specification/issues/93

I don't know who uploaded this document to the IETF datatracker, but
seeing Josh hasn't been involved in the FLAC project for almost ten
years (as I argued in the previous e-mail) I don't think he uploaded
it to the IETF datatracker.

So yes, I think the original uploader was unable to upload this under
terms lesser than GNU FDL.

---

From: Steve Lhomme <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2021 09:28:42 +0200

> some of the people at Xiph know how he can be contacted?

It seems that he was working at Yahoo! a few years ago, making patents
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/josh-coalson

I did not find any contact info...

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From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2021 07:30:28 -0500

Dear All,

I'll definitely lead off with these topics on the agenda for our call
today.

Best,

Spencer

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2021 20:08:47 -0400

> author as well, if possible.

The advice from the IETF Trust is that we need to get the original 
author, Josh Coalson, to license the document under an RFC Trust 
compatible license.
Somewhere else someone said that they had a phone number.
Please, if you could unicast that to me, I will phone Josh tomorrow.

---

From: Martijn van Beurden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2021 07:19:30 +0200

> Please, if you could unicast that to me, I will phone Josh tomorrow.

If you happen to get hold of him, it is perhaps a good idea to also ask him
whether he wants his name to be mentioned as author, and whether he is the
sole author.