Harald Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no> writes:
Harald Alvestrand wrote:
Based on Simon's and John's comments, I've attempted to create a
ticket that allows us to focus on the issue of "what is an excerpt"
while accepting the rough consensus (John is "rough" at the moment)
that excerpts should be permitted.
Note made after sending the previous:
Based on my experience with how the meaning of words changes when
translated, I'd like to debate whether we consider translated excerpts
to be "verbatim" too - or whether we want to declare explicit
consensus that we want to permit translated excerpts as a separate
resolution.
Ouch, this seems potentially complex.
Are there, or will there likely be in the near future, one "official"
translation of RFCs for a particular language?
If not, there are two positions I can see:
1) Have the IETF license (with whatever wording it will have on
verbatim quotes) apply to all translation made by anyone.
2) Let each translator adopt his own license for his work, and make it
clear in the IETF license that contributors accept that
translations of their contribution can be licensed under whatever
license the translator chooses.
The conservative choice seem to be 1). Whether that is intended by
RFC 3978 isn't clear right now, at least to me. RFC 3978 doesn't seem
to say anything about the license on translations. I can't think of
other useful positions, can anyone else?
However, this may create confusion, if two translations to a language
exists, that is subtle different, and is cited somewhere. Then the
claim "RFC x says:" seem incorrect.
Perhaps we shouldn't allow verbatim quotes of translated RFCs to say
"RFC x says:" at all, but rather force it to be "Z's translation of
RFC x says:". However, I dislike a license that is complex enough to
have to go into that kind of subtle details.
As you might guess, I don't have a clear opinion on this.
I note that if we have a permissive license on entire documents, none
of this appear to be a problem. Anyone can quote the original and
translated RFC, however they want, as long as they don't claim
something that is false (e.g., "RFC x says that you MUST do this" when
it really doesn't say that; a permissive IETF license can include
restrictions like that).