At 15:00 12-03-2009, John C Klensin wrote:
In the hope of clarifying and perhaps providing a basis for moving forward... (1) I am a lot more concerned about the "other SDO" case than I am about commenting code and I am more concerned about commenting code than about writing product manuals. The first case is, as Ray points out, a 1 in 5000 situation and, fwiw, I believe there is an alternate solution. For most of the
At the time of this writing, there are approximately 5487 RFCs. If the situation is as Ray pointed out, that's one case over the last 39 years.
At 18:49 12-03-2009, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
My suggestion would be that it is sensible to start off asking for a reasonable effort. It should rapidly become apparent whether this is more trouble than it is worth.
That sounds reasonable as long as people know what they are signing up for. There's the usual discussion about whether acquiring rights includes authors and contributors. Then there's the subjective concept some people refer to as "fair use". As long as the IETF Trust can provide clear guidelines about all that, they can ask for the effort.
I noticed that some authors don't even know whether the "may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008" should be in the "Status of This Memo" section or in the "Copyright Notice" section. Before getting into such an effort, think about how to communicate the expectations clearly.
Regards,-sm