Re: [Trustees] IETF Trust Decision on "Legal Provisions for IETF Documents" (dated October 16, 2008)

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

Ray Pelletier <rpelletier at isoc.org> writes:

>> The document you posted in this thread points to another URL:
>>
>> 4.     License to Code Components.
>>
>>       a.  Definition. IETF Contributions and IETF Documents often
>>       include components intended to be directly processed by a
>>       computer (“Code Components”). A list of common Code Components
>>       can be found at
>>       http://trustee.ietf.org/docs/Code_Components_List_8-12-08.txt .
>
> This is not what I am seeing.  I get:
> 4. License to Code Components.
> a. Definition. IETF Contributions and IETF Documents often include
> components
> intended to be directly processed by a computer (“Code Components”). A
> list of common Code
> Components can be found at
> http://trustee.ietf.org/policyandprocedures.html
>  .

Ray, your initial post is available in the archive here:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg53563.html

Both attachments contains the text I quoted, and the e-mail says it was
the version of the document that was approved.

> It is true that those items were changed in the approved version.

The approved version (according to your e-mail) does not contain that
change, unless two versions of the documents were approved.

>> The copyright notice change appears unfortunate: not all IETF
>> Contributions are documents.  This seems like a potentially
>> significant change.
>
> This may be a valid point and needs some exploration.  Could you
> elaborate?

Primarily:

The Trust should clarify which copyright notice it wants to use.  The
approved document from the mailing list archive above says it should be:

   Copyright (c) <YEAR>, IETF Trust and the persons identified as its
   authors. All rights reserved.

However the PDF available from trustee.ietf.org says:

   Copyright (c) [insert year] IETF Trust and the persons identified as
   the document authors. All rights reserved.

Secondarily:

It happens that source code has another author than the RFC/I-D document
author.  The latter copyright notice will be incorrect in these cases.
This has legal implications as far as I understand.

The BSD license applies to Code Components in IETF Contributions, and
not all IETF Contributions are documents.

I admit that the majority of relevant origins for Code will be in
RFC/I-D's, but given that e-mail to IETF lists and other contributions
are counted as IETF Contribution, and thus their Code parts are covered
by the BSD license, it is confusing for the copyright notice to then
refer to a "document".

I believe the change to section 4 of the Trust License is sub-optimal
and was not discussed with the IETF community, at least as far as I am
aware.  The earlier draft versions did not contain this text, and the
draft Jorge sent me to review did not either.  I would have brought it
up if it was present at that time.

>>   The latter list is more appropriate for another reason: it was the
>>   latter list that was approved by the Trustees according to your
>>   initial post in this thread.
>
> Could you point me to what you believe to be my initial post in this
> thread?

See above.

/Simon
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