Re: 5378 Procedures Fix

[John C Klensin <john-ietf at jck.com>]

--On Thursday, March 12, 2009 15:54 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:

>...
> Well, how about making a generic 5378 license sign-up an
> option when either submitting an I-D or registering for an
> IETF meeting? After a few months, you'd capture most current
> active contributors that way. And an email sweep of all RFC
> authors would capture some more (and a lot of bounce messages).

Except for those who couldn't commit on work done for prior
employers, some of whom might have strong opinions on the
subject (or who might have gone out of business and had their
assets sold to companies whose opinions are unknown).   For
those situations, one would need an extremely nuanced statement,
probably one nuanced enough to end up saying nothing.

Again:

Our principal goal should be to get effective documents that the
IETF can use written efficiently.    Any other goals, including
transfers of rights to the Trust and things that the Trust might
want to let third parties do (as outlined in 5377 or otherwise)
have to be subsidiary to that.

That has at least two corollaries:

-- Anything done to acquire 5378 rights needs to be
non-intrusive.  If declining to grant those rights (for any
reason), becomes time-consuming or painful, then it is probably
a bad idea.   For example, I'd object to clicking "submit" in
the automatic I-D submission tool sequence and having to deal
with a Note Well page that asks that I agree to additional
rights transfer or assertion before continuing to get the draft
into the queue.

-- We should not expect authors to make assertions or
commitments on behalf of anyone other than themselves and
current employers, nor to assume whatever theoretical or
practical liabilities might arise from doing so.  That
constraint applies not just to former employers whose agreement
may be difficult to obtain but to people who think they are
Contributors whether they are explicitly listed or not.    If
authors want to make those commitments, that is fine, but we
should not push people in that direction unless the IETF Trust
is willing to indemnify people against bad consequences of their
well-intentioned and good faith actions and agreements.

-- The one assertion we _can_ expect people to be able to make
is that there is no material in a given document that originated
before 10 November on the assumption that the Note Well covers
everything else (modulo my often-repeated concerns that the lack
of explicit, serious-efforts, notification and even a modified
Note Well until much later makes the 10 November date
meaningless in practice).  But that is almost exactly what the
current "with or without workaround" situation gives on.

    john