The IETF Trustees invited community comments on the proposed revisions to the "Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents" (TLP) policy on 23 June 2009. The proposed revisions are in rtf, pdf and doc formats and located at: http://trustee.ietf.org/policyandprocedures.html under Draft Policies and Procedures for IETF Documents. On 18 July, in a reply to Subject: Proposed Revisions to the IETF Trust Legal Provisions (TLP), the IETF Trust Chair said: The rationale for the remaining summary of proposed changes will be sent in a separate email. This is a summary of the proposed revisions to the TLP by section with explanations, where needed: 2.f -- this new language describes the conditions under which the IETF Trust will assume licensing and copyright responsibility for IAB, IRTF and Independent Stream submissions, should the managers of those streams request that it do so. Explanation: The IETF Trust was approached by representatives of the IAB, IRTF and RFC Editor, who asked the Trust to assume the role of "license administrator" for their respective document streams. The Trust is happy to do so as part of its role supporting the IETF. The language included in new Section 2.f of the TLP describes the procedure by which the Trust proposes to handle documents from these non-IETF streams. 4.c -- clarifies that the BSD License may not be applied to Code Components that come from IETF Documents as to which the Contributor has prohibited the making of derivative works. Explanation: An IETF participant noticed that, under the existing TLP, the broad BSD adoption language might "trump" a contributor's prohibition on the right to make derivative works of his/her contribution. The new language clarifies that the BSD license will not apply if the contributor has specified that no derivative works may be made of his/her contribution. 4.e -- this new section clarifies the legend requirements for Code Components that are used in software under the BSD License. In short, the user must include the full BSD License text or a shorter pointer to it (which is set forth in Section 6.d) Explanation: The issue of the appropriate BSD License language to include in Code Components extracted from IETF documents has been discussed extensively within the IESG. The proposed TLP language is intended to be consistent with the IESG's latest guidance language, and allows the user of IETF Code to include either the full BSD license language (about 15 lines of text), or a short "pointer" to the BSD language (about 4 lines). 6 -- the language regarding placement of legends on IETF Documents has been clarified. Placement on the "first page" is no longer required, and authority for placement of the legends is with the RFC Editor and IESG. Explanation: Self-explanatory 6.a - the words "to IETF" have been removed, to enable submission to IAB, IRFT and other streams. Explanation: Self-explanatory 6.b -- a new sentence has been added to the legend that must be placed on all IETF Documents, pointing out the BSD License requirements described in 4.e above and emphasizing that code in IETF Documents comes without any warranty, as described in the BSD License. Explanation: See 4.e above 6.d -- the BSD legend/pointer described in 4.e above Explanation: See 4.e above Comments on the proposed revisions to the TLP are welcomed. Ray Trustee _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
