Re: LC ISSUE: OUTGOING Section 6.3: vague s/w licensing guidance

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

Black_David at emc.com writes:

> I asked a lawyer to review the -outgoing document, and the following
> text in Section 6.3 turned up a concern:
>
>    As such, the rough consensus is that the IETF trust is to grant
>    rights such that code components of IETF contributions can be
>    extracted, modified, and used by anyone in any way desired. 
>
> The concern is that the software licensing implications of that
> text are not clear to someone who has not been following our
> discussions and hence the text could be *misread* as permitting or
> encouraging the use of licenses with copyleft (aka viral or
> share-alike) and/or patent license provisions.
>
> While it should be the case that code in IETF RFCs can be placed
> under almost any software license, (including those with copyleft
> and patent license provisions), the IETF Trust should not be doing
> so on its own initiative.

I disagree -- I believe the IETF Trust should do what the IETF asks them
to do.  Limiting them to some set of licenses at this point seems to
short-circuit their ability to do their work.

There may be perfectly good reasons for the IETF Trust to release some
set of contributions under, say, the GPL.  For example, consider
software tools written for the IETF and assigned to the IETF Trust.

> Hence, in the outbound document, I think it would be good to add
> a statement that the IETF Trust should avoid adding software license
> obligations beyond those already present in a contribution, and noting
> that both copyleft and patent license provisions in software licenses
> depart from the goal of "extracted, modified and used by anyone in
> any way desired," but also noting that the ability to place extracted
> code under such licenses is an important aspect of "use in any
> way desired."

I think this is somewhat confused -- the IETF Trust must decide under
which license outgoing contributions will be made available on.  They
can't use the -incoming license as the outgoing rights, since that
license only grants rights to the IETF Trust.  Thus, it is not trivial
to see what "adding software license obligations" really mean.  Some set
of obligations -- e.g., crediting the copyright owner and/or author --
may be perfectly fine.  The IETF Trust should be able to demand in a
license that users of the contributions retain copyright and/or author
notices.  Thus, I don't think your suggested modification is a good
idea, at least not without much more detail and consideration to avoid
unintended side effects.

/Simon

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