Re: Incoming - software licenses

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

I tend to agree with Brian.

At 04:12 AM 7/18/2007, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> 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.
>
>     Brian

I get to this conclusion from another angle as well.  If we introduce 
exceptions, conditions, and variations then we produce two bad results:
Firstly, we require everyone using code from RFCs to be careful to 
figure out what terms the code is under.  And the RFC implementor may 
even (as has been discussed on the list before) have to take 
interesting steps to avoid license contamination.
Secondly, we cause various working groups to have to have debates 
about this non-technical aspect of their work.  Debates which have 
been demonstrated to consume VAST quantities of time.

Yours,
Joel


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