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Re: FreeBSD has to change its manual because of IETF IPR rules
Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 05:40:02PM +0100,
Brian E Carpenter <brc at zurich.ibm.com> wrote
a message of 19 lines which said:
Did they think of *talking* to the IETF before these changes?
You must be kidding. When you manage something as complicated as an
operating system, you have other things to do than to engage in
lengthy legal discussions (not to mention checking everything with an
attorney) with people when you have already read their legal
texts.
As you may realise, companies managing something as complicated
as a proprietary o/s do exactly this because they have to, in order
to stay out of court or to succeed when litigation occurs. I can see
that this is much harder for an open source project, but I really
find it hard to believe that FreeBSD has no lawyers.
Legal conditions for redistribution and modification should be
clear enough so that no callback to the IETF is necessary (I find the
current discussion often confusing and I would pity the FreeBSD
people if they tried to follow it).
Legal language is rarely that clear and IPR law is complex and subtle.
I'm sorry, but there are few short-cuts in this area.
Brian
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