Proposed license for IETF Contributions

[Simon Josefsson]

"M. Warner Losh" <imp at bsdimp.com> writes:

>     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'.

I found the last sentence slightly odd too, and your suggestions are
good.  I don't think it is necessary to require a reference, it will
be likely be added when it fit the context anyway.  So I used
"suggests" instead.

> "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

I agree.

> 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.

Yup.  We can expand the document later on.

Btw, the new license text reads:

    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.  Unauthorized redistributed
        modified works must (a) not claim endorsement of the
        modified work by the IETF, IESG, IANA, IAB, ISOC, RFC
        Editor, or any similar organization, and (b) remove any
        claims of status as an Internet Standard, e.g., by
        removing the RFC boilerplate.  The IETF suggests that any
        citation or excerpt of unmodified text reference the RFC
        or other document from which the text is derived.

I will update this further today, based on several comments received
when I was away on vacation last week, so expect things to change.

The latest text is always available from
<http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/>.

Thanks,
Simon