From: Marshall Eubanks <tme at americafree.tv>
Date: June 23, 2009 11:30:50 AM EDT
To: Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>
Cc: Trustees <trustees at ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [Trustees] Proposed Revisions to the IETF Trust
LegalProvisions (TLP)
On Jun 23, 2009, at 10:18 AM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
"Contreras, Jorge" <Jorge.Contreras at wilmerhale.com> writes:
4.e -- this new section clarifies the legend requirements for Code
Components that are used in software under the BSD License.
In short,
the user must include the full BSD License text or a shorter
pointer
to it (which is set forth in Section 6.d)
...
6.d -- the BSD legend/pointer described in 4.e above
The text in 6.d doesn't work. Part of the BSD license (quoted in
your
document) is this paragraph:
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the
distribution.
If you replace the BSD license with a pointer, you would violate
that
part of the BSD license.
To avoid simple mistakes when changing things related to the
BSD license
(which now appears to be the norm rather than the exception) I
believe
it would be a good idea for the IETF Trust to talk with people and
organizations who understands open source licensing. I'm sure the
Software Freedom Law Center could help here.
Simon (removing the large cc list):
This language was added after extensive review and consultation with
open source experts, including members of the IESG. There are
several
open source projects (including some run by Yahoo) that use a
pointer
for the BSD license, rather than the full text. We do not think
this is
a violation of the BSD language. You may disagree, which is why
there
is a public comment period for these documents. But please don't
assume
that these decisions were taken rashly or without serious
consideration.
Can you name the open source projects that operate like this? I've
never heard of a model like this before, and I'm interested to learn
about it if it is used successfully.
Dear Simon;
There was a lot of discussion about this inside the Trust, and I was
originally in favor of
sticking with the BSD 15 line template and was very dubious about a
"license by reference" approach. However, there was push-back on the
length of this (from, e.g. Pasi Eronen), and then Russ found out
that for YAHOO the
YUI JavaScript library and the Django web framework (used in
datatracker.ietf.org) don't include the license terms in every file.
The code contain this:
/*
Copyright (c) 2009, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
It is not hard to find examples of this, both within Yahoo and
without.
See, e.g., http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/docs/AttributeProvider.js.html
So, we researched the status of the BSD license in this regard.
I took it upon myself to query various people I know in the open
software community (without, however,
using the name of the Trust or saying that this is for the IETF - I
am, myself, involved in OSS, including in
the GNUGK effort).
