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

[Dave Cridland <dave at cridland.net>]

On Mon Jun 18 08:30:00 2007, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > 	If you do believe the ABNF needs special licensing in
> > this case, I am sorry to say that your remedy is not sufficient.  
> This
> > document imports ABNF from other documents (from RFC 3986,
> > to take one important example).  Those documents do not have
> > anything like what you suggest.
I disagree, I think they do have what Simon's suggesting. But then, I 
think RFC2192bis does, as well.


> True, but I don't believe that is relevant to the document under
> discussion.
I think it's basically relevant - I agree that it may be possible to 
have a generic ABNF parser which is "preloaded" with sufficient 
knowledge to avoid the need for the several ABNF references in this 
document, but the fact remains that there's a lot more ABNF 
referenced in than there is in the document itself - but that, of 
course, assumes that there's a problem here.

> The conclusion remains that if the ABNF in this particular document 
> is
> made available under a more liberal license, it will make
> implementations of this particular document easier and more 
> reliable.
> That should be in the interest of the IETF.

I readily agree that we should have ABNF treated as code which may be 
incorporated directly or indirectly into implementations under a 
liberal license, and I think you're quite right to raise this issue.

I disagree that this document is the place to start what I suspect 
would be a fairly lengthy process.

RFC4234bis, on the other hand, could reasonably start to address this 
from the ground up, and I feel that's the place to direct your 
energies.

However...

I'd personally expect that ABNF was treated as "executable code or 
code fragments" under BCP78, Section 3.3(a)E, much like a MIB, and 
hence your concerns would seem misplaced. Of course, clarifying this 
would be welcome, but the text within BCP78 is not referenced 
explicitly nor copied into recent MIB RFCs, and nor is that text 
limited to MIBs - MIBs are merely one example given - so I would be 
surprised if this weren't intended to be the case for ABNF as well.

Relatively recent comments I've seen have suggested to me that at 
least some other RFC authors believe that the ABNF can be extracted 
and used in the process of implementing a parser, for example 
http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/imap-protocol/2006-March/000136.html 
(Mark Crispin, referring to ABNF from RFC3501, "[...] you should use 
one of the excellent syntax generators that read ABNF.")

So unless I'm completely misreading what BCP78 says - and in that 
case I'm not the only one - I think we're covered anyway.

Dave.
--
Dave Cridland - mailto:dave at cridland.net - xmpp:dwd at jabber.org
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Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade

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