On Sunday, December 12, 2004 16:19:39 -0500 Scott Bradner <sob@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
whatever the merits of Pete's suggestion I think John makes a very important point when he says that it would be better to refer to a RFC by number rather than a BCP by number (and title) because the text can change while keeping the same BCP number (wwhich can not happen for RFCs) - this means that the IETF could (in theory) change the rules later on and bind to the ISOC to someting they did not get a chance to agree to.
Indeed, this is a critical point. While in theory an IETF process BCP cannot be amended without an ISOC BoT resolution, it is still the case that formal commitments of the sort we are asking ISOC to make should involve stable references, not mutable ones.
This is actually a problem which I recently noticed with RFC3667, which requires the following notice to be included in IETF documents:
"Copyright (C) The Internet Society (year). This document is
subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP
78, and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their
rights."This has the effect of reserving to the authors any rights not granted to the IETF or ISOC and which the IETF does not later decide it wants to grab by amending the BCP.
-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@xxxxxxx> Sr. Research Systems Programmer School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA
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