Brian,
On 2007-07-17 18:24, Black_David at emc.com wrote:
...
A starting point may be that some sort of exception and official
approval could be required for code with a license that does not
permit the copyright grant to the IETF Trust required by the
-incoming document.
My starting point would be to tell the person attempting to
contribute the code to go find its original author and have
them grant the necessary license to the IETF, independently of
whatever other license they have put it under, and repeat until
done. I think making exceptions possible will produce a world
of hurt.
That's a fine starting point, but (IMHO) it's already insufficient,
because:
Exceptions are already happening - cf. Simon's example of LGPL
Base64 code, and I believe Simon has already brought a number of
other examples to our attention. Ignoring this issue is a decision
that the existing exception process(es) are what we want. I'd
prefer that to be a conscious decision rather than something that
happens by default.
Also, there needs to be a warning somewhere for those without
sensitive legal antennae that the copyright provisions in -incoming
conflict with copyleft software licenses. The warning could be in
an FAQ or some sort of notice in the submission process and/or tool;
it doesn't have to be in the -incoming document itself. My concern
here is that I suspect that the members of this mailing list are
among the minority that understand the conflict between copyleft
and the -incoming copyright grant.