This message is an update for the community on the IETF Trustee's
progress towards adopting a policy on "Legal Provisions for IETF
Documents", pursuant to the last two remaining I-Ds from the IPR WG.
The Trustees met via telechat last Thursday. We reviewed the draft
policy (as posted to the Trustees website on 09-08-08), plus all of the
good comments and suggestions which you posted to the IPR-WG list,
and/or sent directly to the Trustees. Thank You!.
I am pleased to report that we are almost (finally) finished. By the
end of last week's meeting, the Trustees reached consensus on all of the
text in the draft policy except for one paragraph that describes what is
(or is not) intended with respect to the license for code components
which may be in a Contribution. Jorge Contreras was actioned to
develop new text to clarify this. The old text was in Section 4.c and
read as follows:
c. License. When Code Components are copied, published,
displayed or distributed as part of a document that is intended
to be read or referenced by persons, and not for direct
processing by a computer, they are licensed under the terms set
forth in Section 3 of these Legal Provisions. When Code
Components are copied, published, displayed or distributed for
direct processing by a computer, they are hereby licensed to
each person who wishes to receive such a license on the terms
of the "BSD License"....
There has been a lot of discussion on the list about the intended
meaning of the above words. As a result, the last item on the Trustee's
work plan for the policy is to reach closure on unambiguous text for
Section 4.c.
The intent is to clearly identify that code components, if extracted
from an IETF Contribution or an IETF Document under the terms of the BSD
license as set forth in Section 4.c, may be freely modified and that the
code and those modifications are unrestricted with respect to how they
can be used and distributed. This is important because we understand
that code components taken from IETF documents are to be treated
differently from what can be done with any other text extracted from
IETF Contributions and IETF Documents.
The following paragraph contains the new text which we are now proposing
to replace the old wording (from above).
c. License. In addition to the licenses granted under Section 3,
Code Components are also licensed to each person who wishes to receive
such a license on the terms of the "BSD License" (
http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php ), as described below.
If a licensee elects to apply the BSD License to a Code Component, then
the additional licenses and restrictions set forth in Section 3 and
elsewhere in these Legal Provisions shall not apply thereto.
** Do these new words for Section 4.c convey our meaning clearly, and
(equally importantly) do they reflect the consensus of the community?
Please let us know.
The Trustees want to reach closure on this within the next two weeks.
We want to adopt a policy we can all use starting October 2008.
Please view this message as the last call for comments. A complete
version of the proposed policy, including the new text for Section 4.c
has been posted to the Trustee's website at:
http://trustee.ietf.org/policyandprocedures.html . The vintage of the
documents being last-called is 09-19-08.
Best Regards, and Thanks in advance,
Ed Juskevicius, on behalf of the Trustees
edj(_at_)nortel(_dot_)com
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