From what I can see, the text in RFC 5378 is pretty unambiguous that
the rights granted to the IETF trust are non-exclusive. I don't imagine
we're arguing about whether authors have the legal ability to grant
rights in their work to others under different terms, as long as those
terms don't somehow interfere with the rights granted to the IETF.
For this document, it's clear that the authors intend to grant
additional rights to their text.
I think there are two questions here: the first is whether the authors
are allowed to be transparent and include the extra rights grant as part
of the IETF document, or if they simply indicate that rights grant in
some other venue and leave the RFC silent on the topic. I suspect that
more information is better than less, and that is not in the IETF's
interest to bury the intention to grant additional rights. To that end,
I see the RFC 5215 and RFC 6716 approaches as vastly superior to hiding
the grant in the XML source [1] or precluding mention altogether.
The second question is whether the authors should have the IETF Trust
grant these additional rights (in the style of RFC 6716), or whether the
authors grant these rights directly (as in RFC 5215). I don't think it
matters, but we should certainly allow at least one of the two
formulations. It would also be nice if we settled on a recommended
practice, and documented it somewhere so that it didn't cause a
hullabaloo whenever authors tried to grant additional rights.
/a
_____
[1] Obligatory Douglas Adams reference:
Prosser: But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning
office for the last nine months.
Arthur: Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them,
yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to
call
attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or
anything.
Prosser: But the plans were on display...
Arthur: On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.
Prosser: That's the display department.
Arthur: With a torch.
Prosser: The lights had probably gone out.
Arthur: So had the stairs.
Prosser: But look, you found the notice, didn't you?
Arthur: Yes. Yes I did. It was on display at the bottom of a locked filing
cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying
"beware of the leopard."
On 2/3/16 13:19, Timothy B. Terriberry wrote:
Hi Stephan,
Stephan Wenger wrote:
However, it is still a procedural end-run around the currently
> in-force IETF position that the IETF reserves the right for itself to
> create derivative works from the RFCs it created (my paraphrasing).
I am trying to follow the procedure. RFC 5377 says that authors should
be able to grant these rights. The first example I know of people
doing this was by putting a copyright statement in the XML source (RFC
2629). But my understanding was that it was later preferred that an
additional grant be added in a section of the draft (see RFC 5215
Section 11). Then with RFC 6716 the IETF decided it was better to add
this grant to the boilerplate text. Now there are objections to that
approach, and we've come full circle to a copyright statement in the
XML source again. As long as there is some way to do it, then I am happy.
Now, such a narrow exception does not solve the open source related
problems, but for that you should really start a debate about the
copyright policy as a whole, because it would be a major change
affecting key tradeoffs of that policy that were deliberated literally
for years.
I am actually personally fine if most authors do not want to grant
these rights. To my mind, they are the ones who wrote the documents,
and if they see these restrictions as beneficial, it's not my place to
tell them they are not allowed to have them.