Re: Proposed license for IETF Contributions

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Arnoud Engelfriet <galactus@stack.nl> writes:

> Joe Smith wrote:
>> I think it is accecptable to allow the modified versions to say something 
>> like the following, which the original
>> appears to disallow.
>>  "This document is based on the IETF Internet Standard RFCXXXX, although 
>> this version is not offical." 
>
> What about RFCs that are not Internet Standards? 
> If you're going to prescribe a disclaimer, it needs to be
> correct in all situations.

As I understood it, Joe Smith did not propose that the above would be
suggested by the license, merely that derivative works should be
permitted to state something along those lines.

If the license require ANY endorsement by the IETF to be removed,
saying the original work is an IETF RFC would not be permitted.  That
is clearly a poor situation, so we should fix it.

Btw, the latest revised license reads:

    c.  The Contributor grants third parties the irrevocable
        right to copy, use and distribute the Contribution, with
        or without modification, in any medium, without royalty,
        provided that unauthorized redistributed modified works
        do not contain misleading author, version, name of work,
        or endorsement information.  This specifically implies,
        for instance, that unauthorized redistributed modified
        works must not claim endorsement of the modified work by
        the IETF, IESG, IANA, IAB, ISOC, RFC Editor, or any
        similar organization, and remove any claims of status as
        an Internet Standard, e.g., by removing the RFC
        boilerplate.  The IETF requests that any citation or
        excerpt of unmodified text reference the RFC or other
        document from which the text is derived.

If you haven't seen your pet issue addressed in this license, you need
to prod me again.

Thanks,
Simon