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Re: the COMPRESSION discussion
At 10:57 AM 3/20/97 -0500, C. Harald Koch wrote:
>Compression is extremely difficult to standardize, due to the number of
>patents on compression algorithms. Witness the PPP WG, which ran around and
>around on the discussion of compression for years, and where there is
>*still* no useful interoperable compression.
The issue that surrounded and delayed the PPP WG had to do with 2 Motorola
patents, neither of which involved compression algorithms per se. One has
to do with the idea of maintaining multiple compression contexts/histories
over a communication link and the second had to do with a way to handle
out-of-order packets and resetting the compression contexts/histores
appropriately. Neither of these come into play in the proposed IPSec method
for compressing. This is because no context/history is maintained from one
packet to the next (unlike PPP).
Perhaps someone else from the PPP world could respond with their knowledge
on the subject as well.
-Bob
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.