Re: Rule of removing adopted work (was Re: Question about pre-meeting document posting deadlines for the IESG and the community)

[Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/19/24 05:16, Adrian Farrel wrote:

AB is right (don’t be too surprised ;-) that establishing consensus and recording history is crucial.

However, “the people” is ambiguous. The I-D, once adopted, belongs to the WG. The charter, once approved, belongs to the IETF.

All changes should be recorded properly, and it is easy to add a note to the History tab in the Datatracker. And these days, it is also easy to add a pointer to an email thread.

 

FWIW, I am just removing a draft in the MPLS WG. The draft is already in the publication queue with the AD, however, it appears that there is no interest in fixing the bugs or implementing the content.

We have had several requests for input on the WG list, raised it on the agenda today, and held a formal consensus call to abandon the work.

Somewhat agree.   A WG can decide to abandon a document, or substitute a different document for one that it was previously working on.   Yes, this should be a formal consensus action on the part of the WG, and documented appropriately.

IESG can also remove a work item from a WG's charter.  Again, this should be a formal action documented in the data tracker.

However, I've never been sure what "WG adoption" means and I don't recall ever seeing a formal definition of that.

I don't think that an I-D "belongs" to a WG, or at least, I think use of terms of "ownership" can be misleading at best.   In terms of copyright, the author(s) of an I-D retain legal ownership of their original work.  They can choose to grant (nor not grant) a license to the IETF Trust to make derivative works, and that permission is presumably conveyed to a WG if IESG includes that I-D as a work item in the WG's charter.   (The right to make derivative works is one of several separate rights granted to the author(s) of a work under copyright law and the Berne convention, upon creation of that work, and without the need for any formal registration of the work.)   As I understand the mechanism, this granting of a license by the author(s) to the IETF Trust is usually done by setting the "ipr" parameter in an xml2rfc document (which is IMO a horrible mechanism for that because it makes it unnecessarily cumbersome for authors to understand exactly what rights they're giving up).  Note that the license granted is "non-exclusive", i.e. the author retains their original rights (including the right to make derivative works) in addition to granting a license to the IETF Trust for a subset of those rights.   And the IETF Trust in turn delegates that permission to other IETF participants.  (I am not a lawyer, but this seems dodgy to me.)

But I have strong reservations (to put it mildly) about the idea that the IETF should decide to grant anything like "ownership" of a document to a WG or another editor, while the author(s) of the document are living, without at least some agreement with the author(s) about how changes are to be managed.   The reason is that on multiple occasions I've seen a document that I wrote or co-wrote, drastically changed by someone (it's not always been clear who) in such a way as to do serious technical harm to the document, including drastically compromising the security of the protocol described.  

The original author(s) have a strong interest in keeping  their creation technically sound and internally consistent.  Other participants may not fully understand the considerations that went into the careful selection of text in the document, and in some cases, other participants may attempt to compromise the technical soundness of the document.   I don't believe that there is anything like adequate attention to this paid in the current IETF WG or RFC editing process.

So, while I understand that IETF needs "change control" over the standards that it produces, I'm also very concerned about the potential for IETF or the RFC Editor to compromise the technical soundness of documents, whether out of accident or malice or some combination of the two.   And I regard any action from IETF management or a working group to "take away" change control from original author(s) without at least having a discussion with them, as inexcusably rude at best, with significant potential for harm to the Internet.  Even if the IETF Trust technically has a legal license to make derivative works of that work.

Keith