November 2021 progress on ABIF

[robla]

Astute readers will note that there is not a "September 2021 progress on ABIF" newsletter, nor a "October 2021 progress on ABIF" newsletter. That's because ... uhm ... yeah, I didn't do all the ABIF-associated work that I wanted to do. BUT NOVEMBER IS A NEW MONTH!!!!!!1!1!!! (actually, Wikipedia tells us that "November" is not so new, and has been happening every year for a while, but THIS November is new....)

I've been having a bit of writer's block with respect to the IPR policy of the spec. The policy discussion about answering the questions "who's in charge?" and "who will own copyright in the specification?" are hinted at in issue #16 . The last time I looked at the IETF's IPR policy, I thought it was reasonable. However, it's not an easily replicable policy, because someone needs to be the copyright owner in order to enforce copyright. My interest in copyright policy (and patent policy, and trademark policy) is not offensive, since I don't currently envision the need to bring suit against anyone, but defensive. I would be pissed if some lawyer served me a "cease and desist" letter for their client about ABIF, since ABIF is being designed to be (more-or-less) backwards compatible with the format that many electoral reform advocates have been using on places like the "election-methods" mailing list for the past 25 years or so.

So what that means is that I'm having some writer's block on the CONTRIBUTING.md file. The ABIF issue tracker has had a couple comments I've wanted to respond to in the past couple of days, and it's clear that there's demand for solving the problem that ABIF is trying to solve. It's clear that I shouldn't let my writer's block get in the way of more active activists. I know that @brainbuz is getting impatient (hence his recent comment in issue #3) along with his fork of ABIF, but I think I need to make sure I'm working with folks who are in no position to sabotage the effort. I'm 99.9% sure that @brainbuz has the best interests of the project in mind, but I'm not 100%, and I'm weirdly conservative about this for someone who has been publishing FOSS (free and open-source software) as long as I have. Working on ABIF has been a good reminder that the specification for interoperability among many implementations shouldn't be driven by the needs of people writing a single implementation (even if the source code for that implementation is freely available)

Rob Lanphier (@robla) -- November 1, 2021 (in most places west of Boise, Idaho for a few more minutes)