Hi.
In an attempt to get this discussion unstuck and to provide a
way forward for those of us whose reading of 5378 (or advice
from counsel) have convinced us that we cannot post most
documents that contain older text written by others under the
new rules, I've posted a new I-D,
draft-klensin-rfc5378var-00.txt.
It would be very helpful if people would actually read the draft
before commenting on it -- it isn't very long, and the key
section that contains the new procedure (Section 4) is under 40
lines of text -- but the intent is to make sure we don't get
stuck or that we get unstuck as quickly as possible.
While the draft reviews the history and context of the
situation, the elevator summary of the proposal is that, if an
author/ contributor is working on a document that contains old
text and concludes that he or she cannot reasonably comply with
the provisions of 5378, then it is permitted to post the
document with IPR rules that are strictly in conformance with
RFC 3978.
In deference to the ever-patient and underappreciated
maintainers of tools, I note that this would require no changes
other than disabling (or later un-enabling) the 5378-only check
that I assume the Secretariat is going to turn on tomorrow.
A different possibility would be to create an exception
procedure in which such an author would have to request an
exemption from the IESG or the Trustees (or for the IESG to
conclude that the variance procedure of RFC 2026 could be used
for these cases). My personal opinion is that those approaches
would add to the workload of people who are already too busy and
further bog us down.
This draft is not intended as a long term solution. Long-term,
I think we will need to revise 5378 to make explicit provision
for new documents that contain older material for which having
the IETF Trust obtain additional rights is not feasible. The
draft discusses that situation further. But I don't believe
that we should even attempt to make that sort of change quickly,
especially since I am very sensitive to Simon's comment from
earlier today that I would generalize as "every time a new issue
comes up, we respond by making things more complex and harder to
understand and work with".
So, in the short term, I hope this document will either provide
a basis for the new BCP that Russ indicated that the Trustees
need or at least can focus enough discussion that someone else
can generate such a BCP draft.
john
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