I have a very different view of this situation, and disagree wstrongly
with John's recommended "fix" (or the equivalent fix of completely
rolling back 5378 and 5377.)
First and foremost, it should be kept in ming by anyone reading this
that the IPR working was convened by the then IETF chair, and continued
by succeeding chairs because there were problems that actually needed to
be fixed. There are things that the community considered (and
presumably still does consider) either necessary or important that are
not properly addressed by the earlier documents. This varied between a
lack of clarity in some areas, and a lack of ability to perform
necessary actions in other areas.
The working group was not convened just because we wanted to, or even
because we thought we could make things "better." If it had not
appeared that there were significant problems, I for one would have
taken the much easier course and just said "leave it alone." And I am
quite confident I am not alone.
Secondly, giving people a choice of terms is basically going to create
confusion. For example, one of the issues raised in the working group
was that our previous rights grant appeared not to properly allow folks
to modify code. And it required them to include things in used code
that made it hard to use that code in various contexts. We want to see
implementations. We want to see accurate, interoperable
implementations. Using the code and tables from various RFC is
somewhere between necessary and and desirable.
But, if we assume that the folks who were concerned were right, then if
we give everyone a choice, anyone trying to right code using our tables,
etc has to figure out what rights they are being granted to use any
given RFC or I-D.
Yes, there are those who argued that there was no problem. However, the
WG concluded that there was at the very least significant confusion, and
probably an actual problem.
Yes, having to get rights from folks is a pain.
But if we are not willing to push to do that, then we might as well
consider that the rights granted to the IETF are locked in stone
forever, and can never be upgraded, because it will never happen.
It should be understood also that some folks actually wanted us to go
further than we did in 5377. 5378 and 5377 represent the best
compromise we could work out. The community is certainly free to decide
that it doesn't want to do that.
While some folks who were there say that they feel not enough attention
was paid to this issue, it is the case that we did discuss at least some
of the impact, and none of what turned out to be needed surprised me.
Yours,
Joel M. Halpern
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