John,
I like the draft. It looks like a fairly pragmatic approach to solve the problem.
I believe it would allow us to continue work where the text had been provided under the 3978 rules. Without something like this, I don't know how I can submit new versions of the WG internet drafts that I am an co-author of. I can not even figure out who are all the people that contributed significant text to the WG drafts much less imagine how I will get permission from all of them to submit the draft under the the 5378 rules.
Cullen On Dec 15, 2008, at 1:27 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
Hi. In an attempt to get this discussion unstuck and to provide a way forward for those of us whose reading of 5378 (or advice from counsel) have convinced us that we cannot post most documents that contain older text written by others under the new rules, I've posted a new I-D, draft-klensin-rfc5378var-00.txt. It would be very helpful if people would actually read the draft before commenting on it -- it isn't very long, and the key section that contains the new procedure (Section 4) is under 40 lines of text -- but the intent is to make sure we don't get stuck or that we get unstuck as quickly as possible. While the draft reviews the history and context of the situation, the elevator summary of the proposal is that, if an author/ contributor is working on a document that contains old text and concludes that he or she cannot reasonably comply with the provisions of 5378, then it is permitted to post the document with IPR rules that are strictly in conformance with RFC 3978. In deference to the ever-patient and underappreciated maintainers of tools, I note that this would require no changes other than disabling (or later un-enabling) the 5378-only check that I assume the Secretariat is going to turn on tomorrow. A different possibility would be to create an exception procedure in which such an author would have to request an exemption from the IESG or the Trustees (or for the IESG to conclude that the variance procedure of RFC 2026 could be used for these cases). My personal opinion is that those approaches would add to the workload of people who are already too busy and further bog us down. This draft is not intended as a long term solution. Long-term, I think we will need to revise 5378 to make explicit provision for new documents that contain older material for which having the IETF Trust obtain additional rights is not feasible. The draft discusses that situation further. But I don't believe that we should even attempt to make that sort of change quickly, especially since I am very sensitive to Simon's comment from earlier today that I would generalize as "every time a new issue comes up, we respond by making things more complex and harder to understand and work with". So, in the short term, I hope this document will either provide a basis for the new BCP that Russ indicated that the Trustees need or at least can focus enough discussion that someone else can generate such a BCP draft. john _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
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