Re: [Gendispatch] I-D Action: trust assets, draft-eggert-ietf-and-trust-00.txt

[Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On 2022-10-23, at 0:25, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On 23-Oct-22 05:02, John R Levine wrote:
>>> is that asset register publicly accessible?
>> It's on the Trust's web site, with a link on the home page.  But if you
>> had trouble finding it, why didn't you ask?
>>>> If you're wondering where the copyright or license info is for all of
>>>> the pre-3978 RFCs, other than a handful of licenses from ISI and a few
>>>> of the authors, there isn't any. As Joel noted, attempting to
>>>> determine the status of early RFCs would be a hugely expensive and
>>>> unproductive exercise in frustration. In a few cases I doubt that
>>>> anything short of a suit in a US federal court would resolve it (look
>>>> at RFC 20) and I hope none of us want to go there.
>>> 
>>> I thought that when the Trust was established, it was supposed to
>>> actively approach authors of pre-5378 documents, especially core
>>> Internet specifications, to get the copyrights signed over. Has that
>>> effort been abandoned?
> 
> As far as I recall, the idea of "actively" approaching those several
> thousand authors was abandoned about 10 seconds after it was suggested,
> as completely impractical. It would have involved tracking down a large
> number of people, or in some cases their executors or heirs. A rough
> count of the number of distinct author names in the pre-5378 RFCs is
> 3810, although that includes some probable duplicates like 'V.Cerf' and
> 'V.G.Cerf'. (I wrote a Python script to compute that number. Run
> against the complete RFC index, it finds 6328 distinct author names.)
> 
> We (the original Trustees) did send messages to the obvious places
> asking people to sign the "RFC DOCUMENTS NON-EXCLUSIVE LICENSE"
> and some people did happily sign it, but the response was underwhelming.

thanks for the history; I wasn't aware that the Trust at some point decided to give up on acquiring per-5378 licenses from authors.

I'll again say that if we had published procedures for management of the Trust assets, presumably that change in the Trust's strategy would have been reflected in that document, and would have been visible to the community.

> It is absolutely true that not all the signed licenses are listed in the
> asset register; several more than the three listed were signed in 2007, but
> I have no records. I signed one myself. As a Trustee, I assumed that the
> IAD would retain and archive them. They may be gathering dust in a
> filing cabinet somewhere.

See my reply to John; I find that a deeply disturbing answer. The Trust has a key function in the overall IETF, one that necessitates accurate record-keeping. I find it astonishing that having documents "gather dust in a filing cabinet somewhere" is apparently how (some of) the assets the community has entrusted to the Trust are being maintained.

Thanks,
Lars