Dave Cridland <dave(_at_)cridland(_dot_)net> writes:
The conclusion remains that if the ABNF in this particular document
is
made available under a more liberal license, it will make
implementations of this particular document easier and more
reliable.
That should be in the interest of the IETF.
I readily agree that we should have ABNF treated as code which may be
incorporated directly or indirectly into implementations under a
liberal license, and I think you're quite right to raise this issue.
I disagree that this document is the place to start what I suspect
would be a fairly lengthy process.
Right, and I have brought this up within the IPR WG. As you suspect,
the effort to revise the license is a multi-year effort.
I don't think it is reasonable to ask implementers to wait for the IPR
WG process to finish before potentially being able to more easily
implement RFC 2192bis. It should be in the IETF's interest to make it
easy to implement all standards in a reliable way. In this case, there
is something the IETF community and the document authors can do to help
improve the situation.
RFC4234bis, on the other hand, could reasonably start to address this
from the ground up, and I feel that's the place to direct your
energies.
I see those as separate efforts -- improving RFC 4234bis is a worthy
cause, but improving that document shouldn't prevent us from improving
RFC 2192bis too.
I'd personally expect that ABNF was treated as "executable code or
code fragments" under BCP78, Section 3.3(a)E, much like a MIB, and
hence your concerns would seem misplaced. Of course, clarifying this
would be welcome, but the text within BCP78 is not referenced
explicitly nor copied into recent MIB RFCs, and nor is that text
limited to MIBs - MIBs are merely one example given - so I would be
surprised if this weren't intended to be the case for ABNF as well.
Relatively recent comments I've seen have suggested to me that at
least some other RFC authors believe that the ABNF can be extracted
and used in the process of implementing a parser, for example
http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/imap-protocol/2006-March/000136.html
(Mark Crispin, referring to ABNF from RFC3501, "[...] you should use
one of the excellent syntax generators that read ABNF.")
So unless I'm completely misreading what BCP78 says - and in that case
I'm not the only one - I think we're covered anyway.
I think you are missing what I tried to explain in my initial e-mail:
Read Section 3.3 of BCP78 from the start. It starts by defining who
gets the rights discussed later on, including 3.3(a)E:
3.3. Granting of Rights and Permissions
...
a. To the extent that a Contribution or any portion thereof is
protected by copyright and other rights of authorship, the
Contributor, and each named co-Contributor, and the organization
he or she represents or is sponsored by (if any) grant a
perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide
right and license to the ISOC and the IETF under all intellectual
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
property rights in the Contribution:
(This is slightly altered by RFC 4748.)
Several people consider this license insufficient to make it possible to
include extracted material from RFCs into some implementations.
Supporters for the effort to revise the IETF licenses include the people
at the bottom of:
http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/
/Simon
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