Re: IETF changing their IPR policy, not DFSG compliant
Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im> writes:
> Hi Simon, thanks for forwarding this.
>
> Simon Josefsson wrote:
>
>> Basically, this post is a For-Your-Information note, and while it
>> doesn't bring up something for discussion on this list, I do think a
>> license change in the IETF may be interesting to some debian-legal
>> participants.
>
> My sense from the IPR-WG and IETF-discuss conversations is that folks in
> the IETF don't have a strong interest in making sure that RFCs are DFSG
> compliant.
I agree.
> However, there is a small "out clause", in that contributors may
> separately license the RFCs they author (since they retain the
> original rights). Perhaps it makes sense to use that in a productive
> and creative manner. I would propose:
>
> (1) We formulate the recommended text of an information notice that
> authors can place in their published RFCs.
>
> (2) We launch a special repository for "non-RFC RFCs", where RFC authors
> can upload their separately-licensed specs (not labelled as RFCs) under
> a DFSG-friendly license.
Good ideas. I attempt to cover (1) in
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-josefsson-free-standards-howto-01>.
For (2), one approach would be to upload xml source for the documents,
and modify xml2rfc slightly to avoid inserting any IETF related texts,
and have it automatically render the document in various formats. This
would only cover xml though, but converting documents to XML even from
*.txt is easy. (And I noticed the announcement for a rfc2xml tool on
the ietf tools list recently, which could help.) What do you think?
It would be natural for the contents of (2) to be packaged by Debian, if
the documents are useful for documentation inside Debian. (I think at
least RFC 5021 is a candidate for this, that protocol is implement by
Shishi which is also packaged in Debian.)
Thanks,
/Simon
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