Re: Section 6.5: Additional Licenses for IETF Contributions

[Brian E Carpenter <brc at zurich.ibm.com>]

On 2007-05-07 20:07, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
> Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > "Joel M. Halpern" <joel at stevecrocker.com> writes:
> >
> >  
> > > b) With regard to code that is licensed under different rules with
> > > some restrictions not in the IETF rules, that code can not be included
> > > as sample code in the IETF documents.  I was told that the rough
> > > consensus was against allowing more restrictive licenses to be
> > > included in the documents.  So, for example, any code that requires
> > > that changes be returned to the origin can not be included as code in
> > > an IETF document according to these rules.
> > >     
> >
> > That would make it impossible to include example code licensed under,
> > e.g., the BSD, MIT or similar licenses, in IETF document.  Doing that
> > has been done with good results in several RFCs.  It can be argued that
> > including example code, under various licenses (including less
> > permissive than this, which there are many examples of in past RFCs),
> > furthers the goal of the IETF, and therefor should be permitted.  The
> > argument against appear to be variations on the following theme:
> >   
> The argument against is that it's onerous and nearly impossible for 
> users to track down the provenance and licensing of each individual 
> piece of code in an RFC to verify its usability, unless the IETF can 
> help them.

Furthermore, it is not particularly onerous to expect RFC authors to
obtain the necessary rights direct from the code authors. There is nothing
that I know of that prevents a code author from granting derivative works
rights to the IETF *and* contributing the same code to an open source project.
There would only be a violation if somebody received a distribution of
open source code and extracted code from it to insert in an RFC.

And I don't think we (the IETF) need to do anything special about this,
since the act of contributing text carries with it acceptance of our
rules. We just need to warn contributors to ensure that they have the
original code authors' direct agreement.

    Brian

> The conclusion of the WG, as I understood it, was that we wanted 
> implementors to be able to exercise the set of rights that the IETF 
> grants to users of IETF code to all users of all IETF code (going 
> forward from the day of implementation).
> >  
> > > Would it be nice to be able to use such code?  Sure.  But having
> > > multiple different sets of rules, and license terms in documents, and
> > > efforts to decide ~are we willing to include this code with this
> > > license?~ was not what the group decided.
> > >     
> >
> > This situation would be the same as for patents.
> >   
> No, because the publication of a text (such as an RFC, or a citation 
> from an RFC) can never violate a patent.
> The publication of a text can violate a copyright.
>
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