On Thursday, Jan 23, 2003, at 02:53 America/Montreal, Harald Tveit
Alvestrand wrote:
The first statement is required for all documents that might be
submitted for Standards Track publication. The primary motivation is
the the IETF retains change control, thus permitting augmenting the
original document to clarify or enhance the protocol defined by the
document.
The second statment is used when "republishing" standards produced by
other (non-IETF) standards organizations, industry consortia or
individual companies. These are typically published as
Informational RFCs, and does not require change control being ceded to
the IETF. Basically, these documents convey information for the
Internet community.
The third statement is used when the documents purpose is to provide
background information to educate and to facilitate discussions within
IETF groups, but can NOT be the basis for any IETF Working Group
activity. This is driven by the concern that unless a document author
agrees that it is subject to Section 10 of the Internet Standards
process (RFC 2026), it is impossible for the IETF to ascertain whether
or not there are any Intellectual Property rights issues with the
document.
I'll take an action to have "or be published as an RFC" added after
"basis for any IETF Working Group activity".
I don't see why you would need to rule out use of the 3rd boilerplate
for non-IETF individual submission documents that are not for the
standards-track. This is apparently self-obvious to you. It is not
at all obvious to me.
Which part of the Section 10 of RFC-2026 does the IETF care about
(and WHY ??) for a non-IETF, non-contribution, individual submission
RFC that is not on the standards track ?
(Hint: I don't think IETF should care about any of that in such a case.)
Obviously a document which is either:
- originating within IETF
- destined for IETF standards-track
or - in obvious conflict with current IETF work (e.g. "end run")
is not included in the scenario that I'm discussing.
Hmmm.. I note that this explanation is missing from
draft-ietf-ipr-submission-rights; obviously(?) the author thought the
copyright paragraphs were self-explanatory.
Question: Can you take an action to tell the IPR working group that in
fact it is not self-explanatory, explain the nature of the
misunderstanding, and ask for the necessary explanations to be added?
Implicit in your answer is the assumption that "IETF [needs] to ascertain
whether their are any Intellectual Property rights issues with the
document" [quoted from last paragraph of 1id-guidelines.txt above].
"IPR" can have at least 2 meanings in this context. The first is:
- are their any IETF issues with IPR that would impact this
document being used in a standards-track manner
The second is:
- does the RFC Editor have permission of authors to publish this as an
RFC (e.g. purely from a copyright perspective)
It seems to me that it SHOULD be possible to resolve the second meaning
by simply amending the 3rd boilerplate to explicitly permit same if
requested by the authors (subject to normal processes).
If you are concerned about the first meaning above, please help me
understand how that matters to IETF for a document that is an individual
submission, unrelated to IETF work, and not intended for any
standards-track status.
If your concern is some 3rd meaning of IPR, I've overlooked that and could
really use more detail on the meaning you had in mind.
Ran
rja@extremenetworks.com