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Re: [Trustees] ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your reviewand comments on a proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem

2009-01-09 18:53:07
My own take has been that the code reuse problem is the dominant problem. Document transfer outside the IETF is sufficiently rare that I would agree with Fred that not solving that is fine.

This also means that from my personal perspective, a solution that says (loosely based on a suggestion from someone else in a side conversation) that
1) If you can, you grant 5378 rights
2) If you can't, you grant the old rights, as long as there is no code in the document 3) If there is code, get the rights to the code so people can actually use the code in the RFC to implement the RFC. (MIBs are already covered, but we have lots of other kinds of code.)

would seem a workable path.
Yes, point 3 may hold up some work. But one could reasonably argue that such work needs to be held up so that folks can use the code we are giving them.

And I fully agree that we should leave all legal wordsmithing to the trust and the lawyers. They have to do it anyway.

Yours,
Joel

John C Klensin wrote:

--On Saturday, January 10, 2009 11:07 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:

Thanks John, I believe that is an excellent summary of the
viable options. My draft implicitly adds

  (2.5) Post-5378 documents that incorporate pre-5378
  materials whose original contributors have duly agreed are
  posted according to 5378 rules, with no exceptions.

To my mind the main open issue is whether we want to
require authors to try for (2.5) before proceeding to (2).

I am all in favor of authors trying for 2.5 if they have the
time and inclination although, mostly, I'd rather have them
spend time on technical work (Marshall's suggestion last month
that the Trust itself should take responsibility for rounding up
old rights has some appeal here).   What I'm opposed to is
requiring authors of documents that might have had a very long
history to take responsibility for claiming that they have
identified all of the original contributors.   My problem with
2.5, stated somewhat more aggressively than is probably
desirable, is that it requires the submitter of a 2.5 document
to stand up and say "I have identified all of those who might
claim to have rights in this document, will take responsibility
for getting that identification right, and obtained their
consent".
There is a possible 2.5bis, which would be something like "I've
made a good-faith, reasonable-effort, attempt to identify
everyone
and have the agreements from everyone whom that process
identified, but I make absolutely no warranty that I've
identified everyone or that other claims won't come up; if they
do, it is the user's problem, not mine."

Whether that is enough different in practice from my (2) to be
worth the complexity... I don't know.

    john


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