Section 6.5: Additional Licenses for IETF Contributions

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

6.5.  Additional Licenses for IETF Contributions

   There have been contexts where the material in an IETF contribution
   is also available under other license terms.  The IETF wishes to be
   able to include content which is available under such licenses.  It
   is desirable to indicate in the IETF contribution that other licenses
   are available.  It would be inappropriate and confusing if such
   additional licenses restricted the rights the IETF intends to grant
   in the content of RFCS.

The first sentence strikes me as confusing when reading the second
sentence.  In the second sentence, the material is already included in
the IETF contribution, therefor a "wish to be able to include it" seems
confusing.  Why wish to include something that is already included?

I wonder if the intention here is rather that there may be material,
licensed under other license terms, that may be useful to include in
IETF contributions?

If so, I would rewrite the first sentence as:

   There have been contexts where material available under other license
   terms are relevant to an IETF contribution.

I believe this would cover the case of including example code with a BSD
license, as for example in RFC 4226.

Section 6.5 continues:

   However, the IETF does not wish to have IETF Contributions contain
   additional copyright notices and licenses, as that introduces a
   number of additional difficulties.  Specifically, additional text in
   the document, and any additional license referred to by permitted
   additional text MUST NOT in any way restrict the rights the IETF
   intends to grant to others for using the contents of IETF
   contributions.

I'm quite confused by this paragraph.

It first says that additional copyright notices and licenses should not
be in documents.  Then it says that those licenses MUST NOT restrict the
rights the IETF grants to others.

What license is referred to in the second sentence?  An externally
granted license?

It is perfectly fine for some material to be available under two
mutually or partially exclusive licenses.  That is the case when a piece
of code is available under both the BSD license and the RFC 3978
license.  A consumer can chose which license to use.

One could read the MUST NOT requirement to say that contributors cannot
license the material they own the copyright on in any way the like.
That seems quite at odds with IETF's past tradition.  The intention used
to be that authors own their contribution, and can chose to sub-license
it to anyone else under any license they chose.  That has nothing to do
with the license already granted to the IETF.

I believe the entire paragraph is problematic.

First, as written, it prevents the inclusion of example code, available
only under a BSD, MIT, GPL, etc license, into IETF documents.  Including
such code is useful, and I believe furthers the IETF's goal.

Secondly, it restricts what IETF contributors can do with their own
works outside of the IETF context.

   Authors of contributions retain all rights in their contributions.
   As such, an author may directly grant any rights they wish separately
   from what the IETF grants.  However, a reader wishing to determine or
   make use of such grants will need to consult external sources of
   information, including possibly open source code and documents, or
   contact the author directly.

Here this seem to re-establishes the normal IETF tradition, which is
good.

As I don't understand the intention here, I can't suggest alternative
text, assuming any replacement text is necessary at all.

/Simon

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