Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 16:27:34 +0100 From: Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Proposed license for IETF Contributions Message-ID: <ilud5kym0wp.fsf@latte.josefsson.org>
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Hi all. I noticed the following in the release notes for 6.0: The following manual pages, which were derived from RFCs and possibly violate the IETF's copyrights, have been replaced: gai_strerror(3), getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3), inet6_opt_init(3), inet6_option_space(3), inet6_rth_space(3), inet6_rthdr_space(3), icmp6(4), and ip6(4). [MERGED] I'm working on a proposed update for the copying conditions (i.e., the copyright license) used on IETF Contributions. One goal is to make the license more aligned with open source and free software requirements. More background at <http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/>. I'd like the FreeBSD community input on a whether a my proposed license would have avoided the above situation, and similar situations in the future. The issue is whether the RFC 3978 license permit using RFC excerpts in source code or documentation (man pages in your case) that is licensed under a free software license. I believe RFC 3978 do not permit this, and judging from your release notes, it seems you share that view. Anyway. Here is my proposed license: 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 specifically imply, for instance, that redistributed 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. 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? RFC excerpts are sometimes used in source code too, so the above scenario with the man pages may not be a isolated accident. I looked at Apache, Samba, OpenSSL and some other packages, and they all cite RFCs in various places. That usage may also be problematic, but I'm not sure. Thanks, Simon
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