Research requirements for IETF-compatible licensing

[zkat]

The IETF Trust is an entity created in order to hold copyrights and licensing for IETF RFCs. It has specific requirements about how RFC documents may be licensed, both for contributors and to the general public.

These requirements are absolutely incompatible with our current CC-BY-SA license, which means we'll need to go through a relicensing process in order to proceed with an IETF Draft.

Before we go through that whole rigamarole, we should make sure exactly what we need to get our past and future contributors to agree to. I really don't want to do this more than once.

The details are over at https://trustee.ietf.org/documents/trust-legal-provisions/tlp-5/ but I am not a lawyer and I'm not entirely confident I would get this right on my own.

[jyasskin]

@mnot, can you point us to the right people to talk to, to figure out how this project needs to relicense in order to be able to be contributed to the RFC series? That might be the RFC Editors, but I want to make sure we know how to push them if they're going to default to suggesting more change than is really necessary. I believe the project's goals are:

1. Continue to be licensed as CC-BY-SA when used outside of the RFC system.
2. Be able to go through all the processes necessary for publication on either the Independent or IETF stream without relicensing again.

But @zkat might correct that.

[mnot]

I'd start with an e-mail to [email protected] (per https://trustee.ietf.org).

[zkat]

I do not personally feel particularly attached to CC-BY-SA, but I don’t speak for all maintainers.

Personally, I liked that license because it would prevent people from forking without allowing those modifications to be used by others.

The IETF’s published RFC licensing requirements also achieve this, by simply not allowing derivatives.

Thank you, I’ll reach out to the Trust with questions