Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:04:52 -0700 (MST) From: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> To: jas@extundo.com Cc: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Proposed license for IETF Contributions Message-ID: <20051121.150452.35505952.imp@bsdimp.com> In-Reply-To: <iluk6f1q4m1.fsf@latte.josefsson.org> References: <iluk6f1q4m1.fsf@latte.josefsson.org>
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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.
> Comments? Suggestions?
The only comment about the wording is the word 'request'. I don't
believe that 'requests' isn't legally defined very well. Are requests
legally binding obligations, or do they communicate wishes that are
free to be ignored? Would 'suggests' be better? If it is
non-optional, then "Any citation or excerpt of unmodified text shall
reference the RFC or other document from which the text is quoted."
maybe with the addition of the word 'substantial' after 'Any'.
"This specifically implies, for instance, that" is wordy and verbose.
It would be better to omit it entirely, and capitalize 'unauthorised':
Unauthorized redistributed modified works must
(a) not claim laim endorcsement by X, Y, Z
(b) remove RFC boilerplate, etc
This could likely be improved from there. A license is a series of
obligations and grants. It should be clear from the grant what one
may and may not do. Having added verbage gets in the way and can lead
to ambiguous wording. Such phrases are better for a companion
'Explaining the License' document.
Warner
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