[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: 5378 Procedures Fix

John C Klensin skrev:

--On Thursday, March 12, 2009 10:54 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:


Ray,

Firstly, yes, that is a valid point to discuss: do we want to
require a reasonable effort from authors, or do we want the
disclaimer to be used by default? Let's have that discussion
in the BOF.


Brian,

Your impressions may obviously be different, but my perception
of the lengthy discussion on the IETF list was that:

-- the community had concluded that requiring authors to make
assertions about the rights, contributions, and perceptions of
others was unreasonable and that imposing any other requirements
that would add to the burden or liabilities of being an author
was not in the community's best interests.  Certainly, we might
encourage authors (and WG Chairs, ADs, and interested
volunteers) who had the time and inclination to track down
others and encourage them to sign off, but requiring that was
unreasonable and requiring any assertions about non-listed
authors (or non-listed contributors) was not acceptable.

-- that discussion was community-wide and reasonably informed
about the issues by the time it ended and consequently trumps
any conclusions the WG reached consensus on, or was claimed to
have reached consensus on, and hence makes any debate about what
the WG did or did not decide or believe about that specific
subject irrelevant.
That's why I've been insisting that the draft shouldn't say that the editors make the effort. I'm also fond of doing post-publication effort, since by then it's easier to share the load. 

SOMEONE will need to do at least some effort, or we'll be left with another


Secondly, I have running code to report. In
draft-carpenter-renum-needs-work we use substantial material
from draft-chown-v6ops-renumber-thinkabout-05, published in
2006. I went through the process of sending email to its
authors, asking for their agreement to post the material under
RFC5378 conditions, and they all replied positively within a
few days. The effort was trivial, compared to the other work
to produce the draft. So I assert that a reasonable effort is
in fact... reasonable, and avoids the distraction caused by
the disclaimer.


But you presumably did not track down and get agreement from all
of the non-listed individuals who might believe they were
Contributors, nor did you identify them, nor did you make a
legally-binding assertion that no such people existed.  Is that
correct?
That's the reason why I've been so insistent that an author/editor identifies which contributions he's copying from - he's the only one who CAN know that, and unless he records it, that information is lost. 
The point above, also consistent with my understanding of the
earlier IETF List discussion and conclusions, is that one cannot
have both the very broad definition of Contributor in 5378 and
its predecessors and the Note Well _and_ a trust in the
assumption that only listed authors count.
That dichtonomy is the reason why I've been so anxious to see if we can find a reasonable legal theory under which the listed author of the last version has the right to license the whole work as it stands.
In all of recorded IETF history, we've acted as if such a legal theory exists whenever the question of needing permission from document authors came up - saying "go ask the authors for permission" is an implicit statement that this is enough. 

             Harald