Re: Proposed license for IETF Contributions
<posted & mailed>
Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Hi all. I have discussed an issue with IETF's copying conditions on
> debian-devel before, and got several supporters. My effort to change
> the copying conditions in IETF has resulted in an updated version of
> my proposed legal license,
That means the IETF people like it? :-)
> and I want to check with this community
> whether this proposed license would be acceptable to the Debian
> community. I have made changes to it recently, and want your input.
>
> My goal is to propose a license that would be acceptable to the Debian
> community and the FreeBSD community, but also be acceptable to the
> IETF.
>
> This is discussed at:
> http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/
>
> You should think about whether the following permit two things:
>
> 1) Include official IETF RFCs released under this license in Debian
> main.
Yes.
> 2) Include excerpts of RFCs into software and manuals in other
> packages in Debian.
Yes.
> My proposed license is:
>
> 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 redistributed modified works do not contain
> misleading author or version information. This
You probably want to write "....misleading author, version, name of work, or
endorsement information", given the following sentences, because being
endorsed by the IETF, being RFC 3030, or being an Internet Standard aren't
exactly author or version information, but I think they are either
endorsement information or the name of the work.
Yes, that's technically more restrictive. Yes, it's just as free. :-)
I suspect if anything the IETF will welcome that change to the license!
I'm not sure about my suggested "name of work" phrase; it's clunky, anyone
got anything better?
> specifically imply, for instance, that redistributed
^^^^^ "implies"
> modified works must remove any references to endorsement
> by the IETF, IESG, IANA, IAB, ISOC, RFC Editor, and
> similar organizations and remove any claims of status as
> Internet Standard, e.g., by removing the RFC boilerplate.
^^ "an" Internet Standard
> The IETF requests that any citation or excerpt of
> unmodified text reference the RFC or other document from
> which the text is derived.
>
> This is still a strawman. I want to vet it by wide review.
It's 100% acceptable. Two tiny grammar errors pointed out, as well as a
place where it could safely be made *more* restrictive and probably capture
the meaning better.
> Note that several accepted licenses in Debian place requirements that
> appear to be similar as the above, in that they require that modified
> versions be labeled as such and that you can no longer claim it is the
> official version. That is the goal with the text. If the text is
> badly worded, please suggest an alternative.
It says what you want it to say, basically. It looks good.
> References to similar accepted licenses would be useful.
Oddly enough, this is actually substantially better than most such licenses,
so I kind of don't want to make such a reference.
--
ksig --random|
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