Hi Yari,
Thanks for sharing your insight!
My comments are in-line.
together with others inside and outside the IETF Hackathon. To me this says:
respect the rules of the relevant open source project when it comes to code.
I agree it is a reasonable principle. But I still have a question.
IETF is individual based, however, not all open source project/community are
individual based. Probably IPR rules of some of them are more adapted to
organization membership, for example, it may require the member to license the
member's patent for free, which match the contributed code by this member's
employees. Put such open source project under Hackathon environment, who is the
member for the project, IETF or the individual's affiliation? Is the Hackathon
participant qualified to write code on or contribute it, if his/her affiliation
is not a member of that project/community? etc...
Probably we could have a guideline for selection of open source project for
Hackathon, or add some note (complementary to Note Well at Hackathon) to remind
the project specific IPR rule to participants to make sure they are aware of
it.
But code is not everything in the Hackathon. You also have discussions,
presentations, and demos. I think it is a reasonable assumption that the
usual IETF copyright and IPR rules apply there. For instance, that IETF gets
rights to use the slides in proceedings, or that if you convince your IETF
colleagues to work on some cool extension, you should let the IETF and
those colleagues know about the IPR you know of...
Sure.
Is this an approach that people feel comfortable with?
In principle, I like it:-)
Note: The IAOC and IETF legal team are also working on this topic and may
be saying something as well. This e-mail isn't a legal opinion; I just want to
express my view on what kind of a setup works for the participants.
And that I think needs to be the starting point.
Jari