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

"Steven M. Bellovin" <smb <at> cs.columbia.edu> writes:

> On Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:20:02 -0400, "Joel M. Halpern"
> <joel <at> stevecrocker.com> wrote:
>
>> 
>> I would be very uncomfortable if every author could slap any 
>> restrictions they want on the code in RFCs.
>> That would seem to distinctly fail the agreed goal.
>> 
> It would also drive the IESG crazy, since it would have to evaluate each
> and every variant license presented to it.  That's the sort of thing that
> gets lots of documents bogged down.

The only reason the IESG do this appear to be because the policy imply
that they need to do it.  If we change the policy and permit code
licensed under non-IETF licenses to be published, the IESG wouldn't
have to do that work.  I assume that would make the IESG happier, and
allow them to spend more time on technical matters instead.

There are corner-cases, though, for licenses that even conflict with
the IETF copying conditions, which may argue for establishing a set of
known-good licenses, e.g. the revised BSD or the GPL licenses that
both appear to me be compatible with the IETF copying conditions if we
permit additional copyright notices, and strongly encourage authors to
pick one of the recommended licenses.

I see no reason why IETF documents shouldn't be able to include code
licensed under the BSD/GPL or other similar licenses.  It would
improve many RFCs.

/Simon