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Re: IETF and open source license compatibility (Was: Re: yet another comment on draft-housley-tls-authz-extns-07.txt)

2009-02-12 11:01:32

Hi Tony,

On Feb 12, 2009, at 7:45 AM, Tony Finch wrote:

On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Jari Arkko wrote:

I agree that there are problematic case, but I believe I hope everyone
realizes this is only the case if the RFC in question has code.
Otherwise it really does not matter. Only some RFCs have code.

Except that it prevents using the text of an RFC as comments in an
implementation.

Ummm, no it doesn't...

There are two reasons why I don't believe that this statement could be true of RFC text with the either the old or new copyright template:

(1) No copyright actively _prevents_ anyone from doing anything. You may or may not have a license to do something with copyrighted text, and if you copy the text without a license, there may be consequences. However, I don't think that anyone actually believes that the IETF will track down people who copy RFC text into comments and sue them or attempt to get injunctions against them.

(2) Even if the IETF did try to sue you for copying sections of RFC text into your source code comments, they'd almost certainly lose, as that would probably fall under fair use provisions.

Realistically, the only way you will run into any sort of trouble is if you re-publish RFCs, or reuse large sections of RFC text in another publication and don't follow the licensing requirements.

Margaret

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