At 5:46 AM -0700 8/13/08, Scott Kitterman wrote:
The copyright statement cannot be removed (and that is fine with any license
that I'm aware of), so it will always be clear that the code came from an
RFC. I believe that the IETF is sufficiently notable that the IETF standard
copyright notice is roughly sufficient for this.
What this lacks is knowing which RFC it came from. This is technically
useful, but is not an IPR issue.
The "knowing which RFC it came from" is the point made at the
last IPR WG meeting (by Bill Fenner, I believe, but it is not explicit
in the minutes, so I'm not sure). While I agree that it is not an IPR
issue, it is a standards process issue. Without the RFC Number, the
link to feed back into the standards process is too weak to work.
If someone finds a problem, optimization, or has a question,
they are stuck, and the community loses a chance to benefit.
My suggestion is adopt a rule that code snippets in any RFC MUST include a
comment to the effect that "This code was derived from IETF RFC XXXX". If
it's in the code snipppet as a comment to copy/paste virtually everyone will
copy/paste it. I suspect that those that wouldn't aren't likely to be
significantly deterred by a license statement.
This sounds reasonable to me; thanks for the suggestion.
regards,
Ted Hardie
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