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Re: IETF Last Call for two IPR WG Dcouments

2008-03-30 11:58:40
Simon Josefsson wrote:
 
We disagree here.  I believe the IETF has a responsibility to
chose a license that works well for a large majority of 
Internet users.  To some extents, the IETF needs to cater for
organizations that make up parts of the Internet.

Users include authors of RFCs as well as readers.  From the POV 
of somebody who'd wish to contribute to the tools the proposed
NPOSL 3.0 <http://trustee.ietf.org/licenses.html> appears to be
close to CC-BY-SA, therefore I like it (IANAL).

The discussed drafts won't let me put "NPOSL 3.0 code" into an
Internet-Draft, they won't let me put sample code with a "some
rights reserved" proviso into an Internet-Draft.  The rules in
the drafts boil down to CC-BY (= credits required), and making
this worse for the benefit of a debian list would make these
new rules even more harmful for many readers.

RFCs without sample code, if that happens to be "beerware" or
similar, are IMO not "better" just because debian folks can use
the sample code in RFCs as they see fit.  It simply means that
there will be no sample code (e.g. in your B64 standard) at all
in some RFCs under the new rules.

The old rules allowed me to look at say sample code in RFC 4122,
much better than to track it down elsewhere.  The old rules also
allowed me to submit an erratum for one example in this code, 
arguably a wrong example is still better than no example at all.

The freedom to do anything with code in new RFCs somewhat misses
the point, if the price for this freedom is no code in some RFCs
to start with.

 Frank

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