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Re: [Trustees] Proposed Revisions to the IETF Trust LegalProvisions (TLP)

2009-06-23 15:10:57

On Jun 23, 2009, at 2:49 PM, Simon Josefsson wrote:

This is another side-discussion that may be useful to do publicly,
forwarded with Sam's permission.

This discussion brings up another (subtler) point about allowing
re-licensing between works licensed under the BSD license directly and
works licensed under the newly proposed BSD-license-via-IETF-pointer.

If the new Trust text allowed recipients to re-license code back to the
original BSD licensed code, and not the BSD-license-via-IETF-pointer
license, I would not object to the new text.  It would allow me to do
what I prefer, and allowing others to do what they prefer.  I would
continue to feel that the new text is mis-guided and opens for solutions
that I believe are sub-optimal, but if others believe they want that
option, I would not be against having that option (as long as I can use
their BSD-license-via-IETF-pointer derived work under the original BSD
license).

Can you send text / mods that would do that ? I am not sure I get it on the first reading.

Marshall



/Simon

Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu> writes:

Simon, I appreciate your concern about the BSD license.

However, I'm not entirely sure why it matters.

There are apparently some lawyers out there who believe the pointer
approach is reasonable. What's the harm in the trust permitting this?

If your legal advice suggests that using that option would produce
inconsistent results, then you can simply include the full text.

I'll admit that I'd be totally happy with the GAP license or (given
growing frustrations) the WTFPL as a license for ietf documents or as
large a subset of IETF documents as we can get.  So, I'm not really
bothered by options that some might view as inconsistent, provided that

1) I don't have to use them

2) If someone else uses them and I'm using their code I can go change
it to something reasonable.

Simon Josefsson <simon(_at_)josefsson(_dot_)org> writes:

Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu> writes:

Simon, I appreciate your concern about the BSD license.

However, I'm not entirely sure why it matters.

There are apparently some lawyers out there who believe the pointer
approach is reasonable. What's the harm in the trust permitting this?

I haven't seen any references to lawyers that believe redistributing
others BSD works and replacing the BSD license with a pointer is OK --
do you have any links?

The BSD license has peculiar wordings here ("Redistributions in binary form must reproduce ... this list of conditions ... in the documentation
and/or other materials provided with the distribution"), so a general
opinion about replacing licenses with a pointer would not apply as far
as I can tell.

If there are lawyers that really do believe the situation wrt BSD is OK, I'm fine with the trust allowing either case. I'm basing my opinion on
the assumption that there aren't any.

If your legal advice suggests that using that option would produce
inconsistent results, then you can simply include the full text.

I couldn't if I receive the derived work from someone that didn't
include the entire BSD license.

I'll admit that I'd be totally happy with the GAP license or (given
growing frustrations) the WTFPL as a license for ietf documents or as
large a subset of IETF documents as we can get.  So, I'm not really
bothered by options that some might view as inconsistent, provided that

1) I don't have to use them

Me too.

2) If someone else uses them and I'm using their code I can go change
it to something reasonable.

I'm not sure you could do that in this situation.  You received their
code under a license that points to some document for the BSD lciense,
and that document does not allow you to change the license of that
derived work.  So you are struck with the IETF pointer license.

/Simon

Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu> writes:

Simon, thanks for explaining your concern.  I agree that if I cannot
replace the poinrter with the full text of the BSD license, then the
trust language is problematic.

I'd suggest that allowing this replacement might be an easy way to
make progress.

Although I seem to have written to you individually, which is not my
intent. If you think it would be beneficial, feel free to forward our
conversation to a wider audience.
Hmm, perhaps I should have added code begin and code end tags to this IETF contribution:-)
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