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Re: Community Feedback: IETF Trust Agreement Issues

2013-08-09 13:37:32


--On Thursday, August 08, 2013 23:20 +0000 John Levine
<johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:

That sounds right. Someone might want to add commentary (even
in English) to the Tao, such as to discuss local
participants, diversity, and so on.

Someone might, or they might rewrite it to say that IETF
meetings have simultaneous translation, and while the IAB is
all U.S. greybeards, the IESG members are chosen to represent
the gender and ethnic balance of the whole world.  Or they
might rewrite it to say that the IETF has corporate members,
you have work for one to participate, and all RFCs are
standards.
...
It's extremely hard to let just one of the cat's paws out of
the bag. In practice either we have change control or we
don't, and I don't see much sentiment for giving it up to
unknown CC users.

I have to agree with John Levine about this.  The decision to
move the Tao to a web page didn't change the degree to which we
refer to it as an authoritative document.  As long as we are
going to do that, we need to maintain chance control over
anything pretending to be that document. That view is, IMO,
entirely consistent with the change approval process specified
in RFC 6722.  Also like John, I don't see a problem with CC
BY-ND if someone wants that on some sort of principle.

But I really don't think we should be changing the Trust
agreement in this area unless someone can identify one or more
cases in which there are specific benefits to the IETF from
doing so.  For the reasons above, I don't think the Tao and a CC
license that permits modifications is it.  Indeed, I can more
easily see if for a subset of Independent Stream RFCs rather
than something that the IETF points to as an authority
(disclaimers or not), but we haven't heard a request from the
ISE.

    john