IEEE1588 patent encumbered -- project needs different leader

[George Neville-Neil]

On Jan 20, 2010, at 14:12 , John W. Linville wrote:

> Well, I had hoped to make more of this project.  But as I'm sure
> some of you remember the (attempted) transition was a little rocky,
> causing me to back-off.  And although I was hoping to devote more
> attention to this project in the immediate future, I have recently
> come to better appreciate that the IEEE 1588 spec is encumbered by a
> number of patents.  Perhaps the patent holders aren't interested in
> enforcing them against ptpd users, but I'm just not interested enough
> to track-down all the paperwork to prove that (if it is even true).
> 
> Due to the patent spectre, ptpd is not going to be packaged in Fedora
> (and hence not in RHEL either).  So my interest in this project
> has been significantly curtailed.  That combined with the lack of
> activity here and the apparent recent activity back on SourceForge
> leads me to the conclusion that there is no point in continuing here,
> at least not for me.
> 
> The infrastructure on Infradead is still available if it is wanted.
> If someone wants to takeover w/ that, I'll be happy to help transition
> the git tree and the mailing list to their care.  Otherwise, I'll
> probably ask David to remove both in a few weeks.
> 
> I'm sorry this didn't work-out.  I wish it were different, but
> it isn't.

Sorry to hear that.  I'd be interested to see the information on the
patent issues if you have links.

Thanks,
George