This is another side-discussion that may be useful to do publicly,
forwarded with Sam's permission.
This discussion brings up another (subtler) point about allowing
re-licensing between works licensed under the BSD license directly and
works licensed under the newly proposed BSD-license-via-IETF-pointer.
If the new Trust text allowed recipients to re-license code back to the
original BSD licensed code, and not the BSD-license-via-IETF-pointer
license, I would not object to the new text. It would allow me to do
what I prefer, and allowing others to do what they prefer. I would
continue to feel that the new text is mis-guided and opens for solutions
that I believe are sub-optimal, but if others believe they want that
option, I would not be against having that option (as long as I can use
their BSD-license-via-IETF-pointer derived work under the original BSD
license).
/Simon
Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf@xxxxxxx> writes:
> Simon, I appreciate your concern about the BSD license.
>
> However, I'm not entirely sure why it matters.
>
> There are apparently some lawyers out there who believe the pointer
> approach is reasonable. What's the harm in the trust permitting this?
>
> If your legal advice suggests that using that option would produce
> inconsistent results, then you can simply include the full text.
>
> I'll admit that I'd be totally happy with the GAP license or (given
> growing frustrations) the WTFPL as a license for ietf documents or as
> large a subset of IETF documents as we can get. So, I'm not really
> bothered by options that some might view as inconsistent, provided that
>
> 1) I don't have to use them
>
> 2) If someone else uses them and I'm using their code I can go change
> it to something reasonable.
Simon Josefsson <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf@xxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> Simon, I appreciate your concern about the BSD license.
>>
>> However, I'm not entirely sure why it matters.
>>
>> There are apparently some lawyers out there who believe the pointer
>> approach is reasonable. What's the harm in the trust permitting this?
>
> I haven't seen any references to lawyers that believe redistributing
> others BSD works and replacing the BSD license with a pointer is OK --
> do you have any links?
>
> The BSD license has peculiar wordings here ("Redistributions in binary
> form must reproduce ... this list of conditions ... in the documentation
> and/or other materials provided with the distribution"), so a general
> opinion about replacing licenses with a pointer would not apply as far
> as I can tell.
>
> If there are lawyers that really do believe the situation wrt BSD is OK,
> I'm fine with the trust allowing either case. I'm basing my opinion on
> the assumption that there aren't any.
>
>> If your legal advice suggests that using that option would produce
>> inconsistent results, then you can simply include the full text.
>
> I couldn't if I receive the derived work from someone that didn't
> include the entire BSD license.
>
>> I'll admit that I'd be totally happy with the GAP license or (given
>> growing frustrations) the WTFPL as a license for ietf documents or as
>> large a subset of IETF documents as we can get. So, I'm not really
>> bothered by options that some might view as inconsistent, provided that
>>
>> 1) I don't have to use them
>
> Me too.
>
>> 2) If someone else uses them and I'm using their code I can go change
>> it to something reasonable.
>
> I'm not sure you could do that in this situation. You received their
> code under a license that points to some document for the BSD lciense,
> and that document does not allow you to change the license of that
> derived work. So you are struck with the IETF pointer license.
>
> /Simon
Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf@xxxxxxx> writes:
> Simon, thanks for explaining your concern. I agree that if I cannot
> replace the poinrter with the full text of the BSD license, then the
> trust language is problematic.
>
> I'd suggest that allowing this replacement might be an easy way to
> make progress.
>
> Although I seem to have written to you individually, which is not my
> intent. If you think it would be beneficial, feel free to forward our
> conversation to a wider audience.
> Hmm, perhaps I should have added code begin and code end tags to this IETF contribution:-)
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