Proposed license for IETF Contributions

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Hi Simon,

  You might check this but I believe that the Copyright convention
specifically
excepts "specifications" from copyright coverage.  I think there's some
other
classes of original work that fall under this.  How about simply
rewriting the
ITEF license to designate any RFC as the complete RFC is a specification,
and therefore uncopyrightable.

Ted

>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Simon Josefsson
>Sent: Friday, November 18, 2005 7:28 AM
>To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: Proposed license for IETF Contributions
>
>
>Hi all.  I noticed the following in the release notes for 6.0:
>
>   The following manual pages, which were derived from RFCs and
>   possibly violate the IETF's copyrights, have been replaced:
>   gai_strerror(3), getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3), inet6_opt_init(3),
>   inet6_option_space(3), inet6_rth_space(3), inet6_rthdr_space(3),
>   icmp6(4), and ip6(4). [MERGED]
>
>I'm working on a proposed update for the copying conditions (i.e., the
>copyright license) used on IETF Contributions.  One goal is to make
>the license more aligned with open source and free software
>requirements.  More background at <http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/>.
>
>I'd like the FreeBSD community input on a whether a my proposed
>license would have avoided the above situation, and similar situations
>in the future.
>
>The issue is whether the RFC 3978 license permit using RFC excerpts in
>source code or documentation (man pages in your case) that is licensed
>under a free software license.  I believe RFC 3978 do not permit this,
>and judging from your release notes, it seems you share that view.
>
>Anyway.  Here is my proposed license:
>
>    c.  The Contributor grants third parties the irrevocable
>        right to copy, use and distribute the Contribution, with
>        or without modification, in any medium, without royalty,
>        provided that redistributed modified works do not contain
>        misleading author or version information.  This
>        specifically imply, for instance, that redistributed
>        modified works must remove any references to endorsement
>        by the IETF, IESG, IANA, IAB, ISOC, RFC Editor, and
>        similar organizations and remove any claims of status as
>        Internet Standard, e.g., by removing the RFC boilerplate.
>        The IETF requests that any citation or excerpt of
>        unmodified text reference the RFC or other document from
>        which the text is derived.
>
>Comments?  Suggestions?
>
>RFC excerpts are sometimes used in source code too, so the above
>scenario with the man pages may not be a isolated accident.  I looked
>at Apache, Samba, OpenSSL and some other packages, and they all cite
>RFCs in various places.  That usage may also be problematic, but I'm
>not sure.
>
>Thanks,
>Simon
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