On 11-okt-04, at 1:26, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
However, this is not to say that having anyone who feels like it modify RFCs and republish them is a good idea. Treating natural language text as source code is a spectacularly bad idea. But then, anyone who has ever tried submitting changes to the collected works of Shakespeare already knew that.
Many people have taken the works of Shakespeare and modified them. Several successful movies, musicals, etc. come to mind.
I'd be interested to see how many lines of West Side Story actually match Romeo and Julia... Deriving something new from natural language generally doesn't entail significant verbatim copying. Improving on software on the other hand is much easier if existing code can be reused.
(There are numerous other differences as well. For instance, while it's common for software writers to write software they want to run themselves, text writers generally don't write in order to be able to read what they've written.)
What the free software community would like is a license that would allow it to take the text an RFC and use that text for writing software, other standards (or non-standards), etc. We don't have any need --- or I hope want --- to mis-represent the modified versions as standards of the IETF.
Have you tried asking RFC authors for the additional rights you require?
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