US patent 5473599

Wed Apr 23 16:47:36 UTC 2014

* Paul WALL <pauldotwall at gmail.com> [2014-04-22 19:30]:
> Both CARP and VRRP use virtual router MAC addresses that start with
> 00:00:5e.  This organizational unique identifier (OUI) is assigned to
> IANA, not OpenBSD or a related project.  The CARP authors could have
> gotten their own from IEEE.  OUIs are not free but the cost is quite
> reasonable (and was even more reasonable years ago when this
> unfortunate decision was made).

we're an open source project, running on a rather small budget almost
exclusively from donations, so "quite reasonable" doesn't cut it.

> The next two octets for IPv4 VRRP are 00:01.  Highly coincidentally,
> the CARP folks *also* decided to use 00:01 after they got upset at the
> IETF for dissing their slide deck.

you're interpreting way too much in here.
carp has been based on an earlier, never published vrrp implementatoin
we had before realizing the patent problem.
i don't remember any discussion about the OUI or, more general, the mac
address choice. it's 10 years ago now, so i don't remember every
single detail, changing the mac addr has pbly just been forgotten.
not at least using sth but 00:01 for the 4th and 5th octet was likely
a mistake. changing that now - wether just 4th/5th octet or to an
entirely different, donated OUI - wouldn't be easy, unfortunately.
acadmic discussion as long as we don't have a suitable OUI anyway.

> If either of these decisions had not been made, we would not be having
> this discussion today.

we weren't really given a choice.
as I said before, I'd much prefer we had just been given a multicast
address etc. we tried. the IEEE/IETF/IANA processes have been an utter
failure in our (limited) experience, not just in this case. might be
different if you're $big_vendor with deep pockets, but that doesn't
help either. 

fortunately this obviously isn't a big problem in practice, based on
the fact that we don't get any complaints/reports in that direction.
still would be way micer if that situation had been created in the
first place, but as said - we weren't given that choice.

> Nothing personal Henning (and I like what you did with OpenBGPd and
> OpenNTPd) but you'd gain a lot of respect in my eyes, as well as a
> bunch of other people's, if you publicly admitted the CARP OUI
> decision was a huge mistake.

huge? nah.
mistake? probably.

> If your lawyers have advised you not to
> apologize because of liability concerns (despite that "no warranty"
> bit in the BSD license) it's OK - I completely understand.

you live in a bizarre world apparently.
but then, that's what the US (dunno wether that is your actual
background, sounds that way tho) is when it comes to patents and
liability in the eyes of the rest of the world. neither of us can
change that, so be it.

and just to prevent confusion: I didn't implement most of carp, but was
involved, and I wasn't the one dealing with IANA/IETF/whatever either.
No pun intended if I mixed up IETF, IANA, IEEE somewhere here, it's
not like we create new protocols every other day.

-- 
Henning Brauer, hb at bsws.de, henning at openbsd.org
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