Re: #1400 Opinion poll - question draft

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

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

> I really dislike allowing viral licensing in IETF standards.
> I don't think it belongs there.
> If a contributor wants to use different licensing than IETF standards,
> then don't put the code in an IETF document; make it available
> elsewhere.

I believe it should be up to each contributor.  The IETF tradition is
to let each author decide the license terms.  In theory, they should
be compatible with the IETF rules, but that hasn't been the running
code.

Note that neither RFC 2026 nor RFC 3978 gives you the right to extract
code from RFC and use it.  Permitting authors to grant even a
"share-alike" right to parts of RFC gives you MORE rights than before,
not less.

I suspect that in practice, many IETFers would be inclined to license
code in their contributions under a BSD or MIT license.

/Simon


> dbh 
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Frank Ellermann [mailto:nobody at xyzzy.claranet.de] 
>> Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 12:20 PM
>> To: ipr-wg at ietf.org
>> Subject: Re: #1400 Opinion poll - question draft
>> 
>> Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>> 
>> > This is Frank's proposed text. I'll let him deal with that.
>> 
>> That was about Mukundan's questions
>> 
>> >> In para 3, using "MAY" could lead to non-uniform implementation.
>> >> Can this be replaced with "MUST".
>> 
>> No, offering a simple choice is essential.  Brian said he hates any
>> "viral" clauses, therefore he must not be forced to use it, even in
>> the weak form presented here.
>> 
>> >> In para 3, using "similar" is ambiguous. Should we include a more
>> >> binding statement on the type of rights that has to be shared?
>> 
>> Intentional fuzzy, let the lawyers figure it out, it could mean that
>> the GFDL or CC-BY-SA or anything in that direction is similar
> enough.
>> 
>> IANAL, I can't tell what the real differences are in legal
> conflicts.
>> 
>> >> In para 3, "shared alike" is ambiguous without any particular
>> >> reference.
>> 
>> "Alike" = as stated in section 5.3 inluding the proposed MAY clause,
>> it's a self-reference.
>> 
>> >> In para 3, "published" - Any restrictions on the type of
>> >> publications that needs to be done is not clear
>> 
>> There are no explicit restrictions, I thought that it goes without
>> saying that this means "making freely available", any place visited
>> by Googlebot... :-)
>> 
>> Maybe the amended version posted yesterday is minimally better:
>> 
>> ~~~ old ~~~
>> contributions can be extracted, modified, and used by anyone in any
>> way desired.
>> 
>> ~~~ new ~~~
>> contributions can be extracted, modified, and used by anyone
>> worldwide.
>> 
>> Draft authors or editors MAY state that substantial modifications
>> based on the published code have to be "shared alike", i.e.
>> published with a similar proviso, or contributed to the IETF.
>> 
>> ~~~ end ~~~
>> 
>> Frank
>> 
>> 
>> 
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