Scripsit Martin Quinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > but on others, one can read: > > However, this document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by > removing the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or > other Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of > eveloping Internet standards in which case the procedures for > copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be followed,
These are the standard license terms used for IETF documents, mandated by RFC 2223, section 11. They are quite non-free. > I'm quite puzzeled with that issue. For now, I moved my package to non-free, > but I feel this solution as temporary. I would very appreciate if people > could help me and contact the upstream author It seems to be unclear whether the authors of the individual RFC's have transfered their copyright to the Internet Society, or just granted a non-exclusive license to distribute under the common license. In any case, mature standards will usually have so many individual contributors (including authors of earlier versions of the standard) that it may not be practical to hunt them all down and get the text relicensed. Assuming the ISOC in fact does own the copyright (as the notice in the RFC's usually asserts, but possibly on dubious legal grounds), the decision to relicense them would have to be taken by someone quite high in their hierarcy, at least the IESG. If Debian were to make a suggestion to change the licensing to a free one, it would probably be best if it was made by (well-known and respected) people in the system rather than not-a-DD's like you or me. FWIW, I have no recollection of such a request being discussed on debian-legal in the 5 years I have been reading here. I was able to find an official IESG statement on the reasons for their licensing practise, at http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf-announce/Current/msg12205.html and the goals explicitly mentioned there seem to be possible to meet with a free license. However, it is unclear whether the IESG would think that DFSG-freedom would be of any benefit for them *per se*. By the nature of things, the RFCs get quite a wide circulation even without being in Debian main. -- Henning Makholm "They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don't realize that everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation."
