Proposed license for IETF Contributions

[Simon Josefsson]

Hi all.  (If you get a deja vu from this post, see [1]...)

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 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?

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

[1] It was suggested to move this discussion here to reach the proper
audience, so here goes...  sorry if you get this post twice.  Notice
that the license text has been slightly re-worded since the post to
freebsd-questions.