On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 06:52:40PM -0500, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
My own take has been that the code reuse problem is the dominant
problem. Document transfer outside the IETF is sufficiently rare that I
would agree with Fred that not solving that is fine.
If it really is the case that the *only* two problems was document
transferoutside of the IETF (rare) and code reuse problem (what
percentage of documents are are actual code that would require special
case licensing --- small) it's actually pretty amazing that the
problem was allowed to balloon to cover **all** text for **all I-D's
and RFC's**.
There's the old saying --- an engineer takes a large problem and break
it up into several smaller problems, and having solved each of the
small problems, solves the overall problem; a bureaucrat takes several
small programs, and tangles them all together into one, gigantic,
intractable problem.
This also means that from my personal perspective, a solution that says
(loosely based on a suggestion from someone else in a side conversation)
that
1) If you can, you grant 5378 rights
2) If you can't, you grant the old rights, as long as there is no code
in the document
3) If there is code, get the rights to the code so people can actually
use the code in the RFC to implement the RFC. (MIBs are already
covered, but we have lots of other kinds of code.)
We do have precedent for include code that has explicit open source
licensing rights. For example, the MD5 implementation in RFC 1321 has
an explicit BSD-style license. How much code is there, really? I
suppose pseudo-code might be a gray area tht will depend on how
paranoid of a lawyer you are dealing with. One who uses the argument
that "copyright can not protect ideas, just the expression of the
idea", will probably say that it's OK. One who tries to draw a
parallel to translations as derived works might be more concerned.
- Ted
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