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Re: Internet Society's RFC license: DFSG-free or not?



On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 02:05:00AM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> It might be worth going back to Internet Society and asking if the
> qualification on derivative works is intended to be operative or
> informative.  Remember you are dealing with a group that uses the term
> request for comments to cover anything from reports of network outages
> many years ago to the Internet protocol itself.  I might be able to
> make an argument that the set of things that could be a comment on an
> RFC is broad enough to cover all derivative works.  Certainly, if the
> copyright holder intends this interpretation the license is fine.

I agree; if we can get an official statement to this effect from the
Internet Society that we can provide in the debian/copyright file, I'll
withdraw my objection to this license.

What I don't want to see is us accepting this license without any
additional clarification into main, and then have someone come along
with a license like this:

"You're free to copy, distribute, and create derived works of my code,
except you're not allowed to make modifications to support vi, because I
hate that editor and you should be using Emacs instead."

And pointing to our acceptance of the Internet Society's RFC license as
precedent.

[Anyone who thinks that people don't try crazy stuff like this in
software licenses hasn't read enough of them.  See, for instance,
openssl.]

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |       Convictions are more dangerous
Debian GNU/Linux                   |       enemies of truth than lies.
branden@debian.org                 |       -- Friedrich Nietzsche
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |

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