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Re: Call for comment: <draft-iab-doi-04.txt> (Assigning Digital Object Identifiers to RFCs)

2015-07-02 23:29:30
On 03/07/2015 14:55, Martin Rex wrote:
Simon Josefsson wrote:
Christian de Larrinaga <cdel(_at_)firsthand(_dot_)net> writes:

Any chance of adding some words to the effect that RFCs are free both as
in gratis and in the freedom sense?

Makes sense, but be careful with words.  RFCs aren't free in all freedom
senses, for example you can't even include them in FOSS projects since
RFCs aren't licensed freely enough.


Whooops.  I wasn't aware of any non-intuitive limits to distribution of
newer RFCs as-is.  The original waiver

   The distribution of this memo is unlimited.

seems to have been discontinued somewhere around late 2008.
(rfc5246 aka TLSv1.2 still carries it).

It was stating the obvious, really.

Where is the problem with including (newer) RFCs with implementation
source code for distribution?

The copyright conditions for IETF documents don't allow derivative works
outside the IETF process. That appears to be incompatible with some
open source licences that do allow unconstrained derivative works, so
RFC text (apart from code components + their license text) can't be part
of such an open source package.

But nothing stops you including a pointer to an RFC, afaik.

IANAL, so please read http://trustee.ietf.org/copyright-faq.html

    Brian

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