Re: #1400 Opinion poll - question draft

["Joel M. Halpern" <joel at stevecrocker.com>]

My best guess to the "IETF tradition" in this space is that we have 
been very unclear.
In all cases, as was noted with earlier text, any such choice would 
have to be up to the working group, not the author.

But I think that leaving it up to the working group is a bad idea, 
for several reasons:
First and foremost, it means that readers do not know what to 
expect.  Even if we gave the WG a small list of choices 9as small as 
two) we are introducing confusion.
At the same time, asking the WG to discuss such issues is putting a 
new problem on the WG's plate.  They have plenty to do, and a hard 
enough time doing it.  Getting into arguments about whether, for 
their particular situation, some particular restriction is acceptable 
(or a good idea, or a bad idea) when it is not central to their task 
is just a bad idea.

(In the following I will refer to "we conclude", meaning the WG, as 
confirmed by the IETF as a whole at last call.  That's as close as we 
can come to telling anything around here.)
If we conclude that the IETF needs major modifications republished, 
then we should require.
Correspondingly, if we conclude that it does not "need" that, then we 
should not mandate it.
Obviously, we want bugs reported.  But that isn't the same as needing 
everyone's modifications published.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 03:42 AM 12/6/2006, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > 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


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