Re: Incoming - software licenses

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

Black_David at emc.com writes:

> There should be a general goal that if incoming code has a software
> license, then that license should be consistent with the following
> provision of the outbound document:
>
>    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.
>
> and so use of licenses that are not consistent (e.g., copyleft,
> patent provisions) ought to be discouraged when there's an alternative.
> When there's no alternative, things appear to get "interesting".
> Some of these licenses could prevent contribution of code to IETF
> because they restrict the copyright grant to the IETF Trust
> (Section 5.3 of -incoming) in a fashion that cannot be dealt
> with by prohibiting derivative works.

I agree that when there isn't an alternative available, it gets
"interesting".  I believe most practical situations will be in that
interesting area too.  The LGPL code in the Base64 document is an
example, and the many third-party code in various RFCs are others.

However, I challenge that it is simple to solve this when there is an
alternative.  The problem is: Who will decide that something is an
alternative or not?  For anything that is non-trivial, each alternative
solution will have various advantages and disadvantages.  It is rare
that you will find two solutions to the same problem with the exact same
properties.

Going back to the Base64 example.  There are Base64 code available under
more permissive licenses than the LGPL.  However, all of the about 10
such examples that I found and reviwed (before writing my own) turned
out not to follow the recommendations in the RFC, or have other
disadvantages.  Some believed they were "alternatives", but I did not
(and I could point to some section of the RFC).  Deciding who is right
in that situation is difficult.

My point is that any rule written for the situation when an
"alternative" exists will be difficult to apply in the real world,
because the problem is in deciding what an "alternative" is.

/Simon

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