Re: [Internet-Drafts@ietf.org: I-D ACTION:draft-bradner-rfc-extracts-00.txt]
Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> wrote:
> Please explain to them why their behavior frustrate the Debian
> community. (But stop your blood from boiling first...)
If you have the time, please go and do it. IETF have been broken
awhile and I do not believe they are ignorant that:-
* it is not necessary to give permission for "unrestricted
derivative works" to be includeable(?) in free software;
* confusion over what is the standard can obviously be avoided
by use of signatures and/or by naming requirements;
because
* the "unrestricted" argument is attributed to unspecified
messages from unnamed persons on a mailing list;
* Debian Developer Sam Hartman is referenced, who was involved
with the need for modification permission on RFCs before, so I
expect the DFSG have been explained;
* non-IETF changes are described as "capricious";
* majority rule is appealed to;
* Larry Rosen is mentioned;
* Scott Bradner has written in Network Week in favour of the
scrutiny that "open source" gets, but derided modifiability;
* Scott Bradner appears to hold a software patent;
* it fits with my experience of recent IETF actions.
> Don't attribute to malice, what can be explained by ignorance, and all
> that.
As explained above, I wouldn't be sincere if I tried to participate
on that basis right now. I think that some IETF participants would be
quite happy to harm debian.
> Some highly involved people in the IETF IPR WG have claimed they were
> not aware of the problems the IETF legal conditions create for the
> free software community. Since RFC have not been included in Debian
> for a long time (forever?), I had assumed that this had been discussed
> with the IETF earlier. Given the ignorance, that may not have been
> the case. (More information on that would be useful, btw.)
http://bugs.debian.org/92810 has some background, including the
maintainer refusing to contact upstream about it.
> If we explain the problem to the IPR WG, and they pursue similar poor
> conditions, it will become clear that the IETF do not care about the
> free software community. Then we can formalize our own
> standardization mechanism, without feeling a moral commitment to
> sharing the work with the IETF.
Yes, that's one way out of this hole, but it's not without a lot of
work and a lot of risk. :-(
--
MJR/slef
http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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