Re: Last Call: draft-ietf-lemonade-rfc2192bis (IMAP URL Scheme) to Proposed Standard

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

Hi!

This document contains two sections that may be useful to extract and
include into implementations.  I'm talking about section 11 (ABNF
specification) and Appendix A (Sample code).  The rights granted by the
IETF license in RFC 3978/4748 in section 3.3, including the right to
extract code portions from documents into products etc, are only granted
to "IETF Trust and the IETF", and there is no other license to indicate
that any similar rights are granted to third parties.  Being able to do
that seems desirable in order to allow implementation and adoption of
the technology.

The ABNF syntax is the most important, since being compatible with the
technology requires that you follow the formal definition of the URL.
Implementations cannot integrate the ABNF as-is today.  The alternative
for them, to re-specify the module from the text (if that is at all
possible), is bad for interoperability.  If you want to enable smooth
implementation of your standard by everyone (which I hope!), here is how
to solve it:

There are several solutions to this problem.  A simple solution that has
been used successfully in several documents (RFC 3492, RFC 4398 and a
few others) is to add, after the above notice, the following notice:

   -- Regarding this entire document or any portion of it (including
   -- the pseudocode and C code), the author makes no guarantees and
   -- is not responsible for any damage resulting from its use.  The
   -- author grants irrevocable permission to anyone to use, modify,
   -- and distribute it in any way that does not diminish the rights
   -- of anyone else to use, modify, and distribute it, provided that
   -- redistributed derivative works do not contain misleading author
   -- or version information.  Derivative works need not be licensed
   -- under similar terms.

This notice would give third parties the necessary rights they need to
be able to use the normative ABNF syntax module and the C Sample code
from your document.

Btw, you'd might want to modify the text slightly, so that "pseudocode
and C code" becomes "ABNF syntax and C code".  If you don't want to
grant the rights to the entire document, grant them only for the ABNF
and C code.

Btw^2, this and other issues are discussed in:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-josefsson-free-standards-howto-00.txt

Best regards, and thanks in advance,
Simon

The IESG <iesg-secretary at ietf.org> writes:

> The IESG has received a request from the Enhancements to Internet email 
> to Support Diverse Service Environments WG (lemonade) to consider the 
> following document:
>
> - 'IMAP URL Scheme '
>    <draft-ietf-lemonade-rfc2192bis-07.txt> as a Proposed Standard
>
> The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
> final comments on this action.  Please send substantive comments to the
> ietf at ietf.org mailing lists by 2007-06-28. Exceptionally, 
> comments may be sent to iesg at ietf.org instead. In either case, please 
> retain the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.
>
> The file can be obtained via
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-lemonade-rfc2192bis-07.txt
>
>
> IESG discussion can be tracked via
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/pidtracker.cgi?command=view_id&dTag=13735&rfc_flag=0
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> IETF-Announce mailing list
> IETF-Announce at ietf.org
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce

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