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Re: Fwd: Subversion AppleDouble patch updated to 1.5.0

From: Peter Samuelson <peter_at_p12n.org>
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:24:39 -0500

[Steve Sisak]
>> With no license. Ummm. Lee Jones, you have a call on line 1. Lee
>> Jones, line 1, please.
>
> From <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1740.txt> (link on patch page):
[...]
> Is that sufficient?

Not to be a PITA, but this is a concrete example of why the Debian
Project (not to say the Subversion Project, I'm not speaking for
Subversion) does not accept the IETF license on RFC documents as being
free - because it stipulates that modified distribution _must_ go
through the RFC Editor process. People think it's a reasonable
limitation because the only modifications you really need to do on RFCs
is to produce newer RFCs. Well, not always! In our case we would need
the ability to modify this text in Subversion, for any number of
reasons, without having to post a new draft RFC in order to do so.

Now I believe there was a license change in the IETF at some point and
really old RFCs are not always covered by the current license - RFC
1740 is certainly old, but I don't know if it's old enough. It doesn't
state its own modification/distribution terms, though.

OTOH, this file is purely "interfaces", which, being pure factual
information, can't be copyrighted at all in some jurisdictions as there
is no creative input. Therefore it _may_ be acceptable to simply file
off the serial numbers (i.e., rewrite the comments and change the
#define constants) and call it good. I'm the wrong person to ask
whether that would be reasonable in our case.

-- 
Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/
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Received on 2008-08-11 17:24:56 CEST

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