Re: Outgoing section 5.5 and draft-josefsson (Re: San Diego meeting slot)

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Brian E Carpenter <brc <at> zurich.ibm.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>Joel M. Halpern wrote:
>>
>>>Well, I sure understood the rough consensus of the working group to
>>>be "everyone can use the code any way they want."
>>
>>I agree, but (as for text) this is inevitably limited by any
>>copyright restrictions placed by the author on top of what the
>>IETF says. Given that we are not asking for all possible
>>inbound rights, I don't see how to avoid doing something.
>>
>>I would suggest changing this:
>>
>>   However, the IETF does not wish to have IETF
>>   Contributions contain additional copyright notices and licenses, as
>>   that introduces a number of additional difficulties.
>>
>>into
>>
>>   However, the IETF believes it is confusing for IETF Contributions
>>   to contain additional copyright notices and licenses, and wishes
>>   such material to be external to IETF documents.
> 
> 
> Let's take this slow.
> 
> The above change (if approved etc) would make it harder to include any
> source code in IETF documents.  Agree, yes/no?

No! it means that if you want to attach a license to source code
in an RFC, you do so external to the RFC.

> Removing source code from IETF documents would decrease the usefulness
> of the specifications.  Agree, yes/no?

Yes, but that is not a consequence.

    Brian

> 
> If you answer yes to both, then I hope that you see how I can claim
> that this approach is actively working against both the running code
> and the stated goals of the IETF.
> 
> Working against the IETF's mission could be justified, I suppose, if
> there is some strong reason why things have to be in a particular way.
> I don't see a strong reason here.  Above, I see a weak justification
> that "it is confusing".  If something appears to be confusing, I think
> we should strive towards making it less confusing.  Personally, I
> don't find this topic that confusing.  A lot of people that work on
> free software, myself included, work with material that carry multiple
> copyright notices every day.  What's confusing about it?
> 
> /Simon
>