Brian E Carpenter <brc at zurich.ibm.com> writes:
Joel M. Halpern wrote:
Well, I sure understood the rough consensus of the working group to be "everyone can use the code any way they want."
I agree, but (as for text) this is inevitably limited by any copyright restrictions placed by the author on top of what the IETF says. Given that we are not asking for all possible inbound rights, I don't see how to avoid doing something.
I would suggest changing this:
However, the IETF does not wish to have IETF Contributions contain additional copyright notices and licenses, as that introduces a number of additional difficulties.
into
However, the IETF believes it is confusing for IETF Contributions to contain additional copyright notices and licenses, and wishes such material to be external to IETF documents.
Let's take this slow.
The above change (if approved etc) would make it harder to include any source code in IETF documents. Agree, yes/no?
No! it means that if you want to attach a license to source code in an RFC, you do so external to the RFC.
Removing source code from IETF documents would decrease the usefulness of the specifications. Agree, yes/no?
Yes, but that is not a consequence.
Brian
If you answer yes to both, then I hope that you see how I can claim that this approach is actively working against both the running code and the stated goals of the IETF.
Working against the IETF's mission could be justified, I suppose, if there is some strong reason why things have to be in a particular way. I don't see a strong reason here. Above, I see a weak justification that "it is confusing". If something appears to be confusing, I think we should strive towards making it less confusing. Personally, I don't find this topic that confusing. A lot of people that work on free software, myself included, work with material that carry multiple copyright notices every day. What's confusing about it?
/Simon
_______________________________________________ Ipr-wg mailing list Ipr-wg at ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg