On 16-Feb-23 07:47, John C Klensin wrote:
Jay and Trustees,
(I've taken the liberty of copying the IETF list because this
type of licensing change appears to affect the entire community,
not just those who are participating in or following tools
development.)
I think the principle of moving from CC to IETF-specific rules
is just fine. However, I question whether doing so by
referencing/ incorporating the Note Well is a good way to
accomplish that. The problem as I see it is that the Note Well
is a somewhat informal narrative document that points to other
things.
Indeed. It isn't the law; it's an indication that certain laws
apply. But on the other hand, duplicating material is often
problematic. Maybe the phrasing should be something like:
Contributions to this wiki are considered to be contributions
to the IETF standards process. For further information, please
see the documents cited at https://www.ietf.org/about/note-well/.
(Alternatively, adapt the "Official boilerplate text" intended
for github repos, which is in the relevant IESG Statement:
https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/statements/open-source-repositories-license/ )
Brian
Those other things get careful review and are clearly
community consensus documents. The Note Well is more
explanatory, has been revised with less formal determination of
community consensus, and has evolved to contain considerable
material that has nothing to do with IPR. The current version
now even begins "This is a reminder of IETF policies...".
Telling someone who is, e.g., about to join a mailing list or
participate in a meeting to go read the Note Well and understand
and accept what it includes (directly and by reference) is, IMO,
fine. But we have changed it many times to make it more clear
(also a good thing) without detailed community review and
approval. Nothing wrong with that either, as long as it is
narrative/ explanatory. But, where things move from an
explanation to participants and a collection of pointers to an
actual license, I think that license should be referencing
primary materials, or at least an easily located Trust document
that does so, not less formal narrative/ explanatory text,
especially when the latter contains irrelevant material.
best,
john
--On Wednesday, February 15, 2023 15:52 +0000 Jay Daley
<exec-director@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is a heads up that the IETF Trust have asked us to change
the licensing on the IETF wiki (and by implication our other
user-editable wikis) from CC BY 4.0 to "All content is covered
by the IETF Note Well" as they are concerned that our wikis
contain contributions to the standards process and these are
not normally licensed under CC By 4.0. We will be making this
change on Friday.
We are also talking to the Trust about how to ensure that
contributions to the wiki are managed in accordance with RFC
5378. This may require some significant changes in the
contribution and content management model for the wikis. I am
hopeful that the Trust will raise this directly with the
community in due course.
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