Re: A simpler idea

[Simon Josefsson <jas at extundo.com>]

"David B Harrington" <dbharrington at comcast.net> writes:

> Hi,
>
> While I believe it is important to try to constrain the use of RFCs
> for activities that are supportive of interoperability and standard,
> we need to make sure we don't make it illegal to create running code
> that is a variation of an existing standard; that's how standards get
> improved.
>
> The IETF depends on running code, but the IETF does not develop
> running code, so we need to be sure other people can develop running
> code that can later be brought to the IETF as a contributions to the
> standards process. And it is an economic reality that most running
> code gets developed as a proprietary product feature that vendors can
> sell to recoup their research and development costs. I don't want to
> see us write text here that discourages vendors from doing this.

I agree fully!

> I think the existing approach seems to work fine, and has worked fine
> for years, and wonder why is this WG trying to change this? Is there a
> known problem we are trying to solve?

There are several known problems, see
<http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/>.

I believe a good-faith company that tweaks an IETF standard to make
the protocol becomes better should be permitted (and encouraged) to
document it in a format that makes it easy to pursue the protocol
within the IETF.  That format is to make as few changes to the
original specification as possible, to simplify review of the
extension.

> I am aware that some free software licenses don't like our license; I
> think thos licenses should be changed to permit official industry
> standards, but that's just my perspective.

You are missing that running code is often released under free
licenses, and that free licenses cannot be made compatible with the
current IETF licensed while preserving the intentions of the free
license.  The current IETF license is incompatible with free software
licenses in many ways.

However, I believe the principles behind the IETF copying conditions
are NOT incompatible with the principles behind free software
licenses.  In fact, I believe they are quite similar.  After all, much
of the code that runs the Internet is (or, for derivatives from
BSD-like software, at some point was) free software.

That's why I argue that we should change the IETF copying conditions
so they better match our principles, and to spend some time to make
sure there aren't legal compatibility issues with free software
licenses.

Regards,
Simon

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