How can we not adopt some manner of "open source" attitude, Paul? That
has been the basic methodology of the IETF for some time. Otherwise, we
would be paying for every DNS lookup.
well, i am not the expert on this, but the discussion has to do with IPR
and change control being transferred to IETF as a side effect of the
publication of drafts and rfc's. historically there have been at least
two approaches: (1) demand IPR surrender; (2) require IPR disclosure. in
the second (and i believe, current) situation, draft authors are required
to state their IPR terms, and RFC readers can infer whatever they like from
the absence of surrender. margaret is saying that sometimes the IPR can
be contested by someone other than the author, and later than RFC publication,
through no fault of anybody's. eric is saying that the previous situation
whereby a draft author surrendered the IPR before RFC publication was better.
various others have said "but what if the IPR terms try to distinguish
between commercial and noncommercial?" my observations are (1) there are
ways to do "open source" without this distinction, and (2) authors cannot
be expected warrant their IPR surrender in any case.
it's a lot more complicated than whether you have to pay for DNS lookups.
re:
...
The open-source community figured out by about 1997-1998 that there is no
way to discriminate between "commercial" and "noncommercial" activity
that does not create fatal uncertainties about who has what rights at
what times. When you add the problems of mixing software with licenses
having *different versions* of such a distinction the downside gets even
worse.
Thus, the licensing guidelines of both the OSI and FSF forbid attempts at
this.
This only matters if you intend to limit redistribution. The older BSD
licenseware limits only liability, not redistribution, and thus doesn't
care about details like commerce. This could be a lesson for IETF if we
really are going to address IPR issues in the boilerplate by adopting any
kind of "open source" attitude.
--
Paul Vixie
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