is there a compliance test suite?
Not as far as I know. I certainly have no plans to write one or subject our
implementation to any that someone else develops. I doubt if anyone else does
either.
The IETF isn't big on compliance test suites as a rule - the overarching goal
here is interoperability, not compliance.
And this IMNSHO is a very good thing. in the past I've worked on software,
notably an X.400 implementation, governed by standards that emphasize
compliance testing. What I've observed is that after passing multiple very
extensive compliance test suites, the software still failed to interoperate
worth a damn and required all sorts of tweaks before it could.
As a result of this and several other experiences I must confess to
considerable cynicism that compliance testing represents a path to
interoperability. In my experience it does not, and has been for the most part
a colossal waste of time.
if so, does it have a reasonable license? (eg MIT BSD)
The presence of absence of such a license for Sieve implementations, XML
converter implementations, compliance tests, etc. etc. really isn't relevant
here.
is there a (standard) copy of the schema available under a reasonable
(MIT, BSD) license?
Well, now you't hit on a sore point. My understanding is that the intent is for
the copyright on RFCs to allow essentially unrestricted reuse of all the
material RFCs contains: Text, programs, schemata, etc. But the actual copyright
that's applied falls short of this.
Attempts are ongoing to fix this, culminating in some new copyright boilerplate
that apparently will be required for use in another couple of days even though
the update to xml2rfc, the primary tool a lot of folks use to produce Internet
Drafts , has not been released yet. (And yes, I'm aware there's a beta that
supports it. Just what I need: More beta software in my life.)
Will the new boilerplate give you the permission you need to simply use the
schema from the specificaiton. Hopefully the answer to that is yes. But IANAL,
and there are already more than enough engineers around here playing at being
laywers. We don't need any more, so I'm taking no position on any of this
stuff.
The bottom line, such as it is, is that there's effectively no leeway in the
copyright boilerplate you have to use if you want your stuff published as an
RFC. So I, and I suspect a lot of others, simply go with the flow and use
whatever we're told we have to use. If this is problematic for you, the place
to take that up is on the IPR WG list. It is not within our charter here to
consider such matters in any case.
Ned