[Ron Johnson] > If O'Reilly wants to write a book on implementing smtp or dns they > must get permission from the IETF?
Not if they either (1) do not quote the RFCs at all, beyond what is permitted by fair use, or (2) reprint the RFC verbatim. Those things are permitted, and those are what O'Reilly would probably want. What is not permitted is to create an email exchange protocol, or a hierarchical name record infrastructure protocol, which is similar to SMTP or DNS, and while doing so, use the appropriate RFCs as a starting point for producing your spec. (Note also that your new protocol doesn't even have to be all that similar to SMTP or DNS for the ability to cut and paste RFC text to be potentially useful to you.) I mean, you can do that, but only if you're willing to participate in the IETF standardization process. Which, if you're just some random company producing internal docs for an internal product, you probably don't want. Of course, you are free not to think Debian's required freedoms are actually useful or reasonable. That's nothing new; lots of people don't see why it's useful to require source code for software, either. Fact is, many of us _do_ think these freedoms are valuable, and we don't like the idea of trying to define little special cases, like "well, nobody would probably want to cut and paste things from an RFC anyway, like they might from other documents". -- Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/