Re: Debian's Linux kernel continues to regress on freedom
Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
> On 09/12/07 09:16, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> The IETF reserves the right to work on derivative standards based on
>> RFCs to itself. You cannot do so outside the IETF without violating
>> the RFC license.
> So you (or your company) must be a member of the IETF to submit a draft
> RFC?
There's no such things as a member of the IETF, really. Instead, what it
means in practice is that you have to use the IETF process (I-Ds, working
groups, etc.) and it doesn't appear that you have any rights to distribute
documents derived from RFCs outside of that process.
> If so, it seems reasonable.
Whether it's reasonable or not is a debate that's probably off-topic for
here and depends a lot on how you feel that standards development should
work. However, it's completely and unambiguously non-free by the DFSG
definition of free.
We previously had a vote on whether the DFSG should extend to the entire
contents of the archive or only to software, and the vote outcome was that
it extended to the entire contents of the archive. Unless you're
proposing that we vote on it again and have some reason to believe that
the outcome would be different this time, it seems pointless to argue
about it some more.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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