Re: [Trustees] ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your review and comments on a proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem

--On Thursday, January 08, 2009 02:49:16 PM -0800 Fred Baker 
<fred@cisco.com> wrote:

>  From my perspective, the best approach involves keeping the general case
> simple. The documents that have been transferred outside the IETF in the
> past five years is a single digit number, a tenth of a percent of all
> RFCs if not a smaller fraction. From my perspective, the simplest
> solution to the transfer issue is to ask the people relevant to a
> document for which transfer has been suggested whether they have an issue
> with transferring it, rather than asking every document author his or her
> opinion on the vast majority of documents, which will never be
> transferred. Remember that this boilerplate affects internet drafts, but
> most internet drafts are discussion documents - a fraction of internet
> drafts even become RFCs, and a small fraction of RFCs are transferred
> elsewhere.

The difficulty with this approach is that it allows authors to decide 
whether to grant us the rights we require until the point at which we wish 
to exercise them, rather than requiring that they grant those rights before 
we take their contribution and turn it into a widely-deployed Internet 
standard.

I don't believe we need to go back and ask every author of every published 
RFC and I-D to grant the additional rights, and I don't believe we need to 
have a system that blocks the submission and/or progress of current 
documents solely because they are built on earlier documents which were 
published before the new rules came into effect.  However, I do think if we 
want the additional rights required by RFC5378, we need to require they be 
granted at the time that a document is submitted.

It sounds to me like the trustees' proposal does a reasonable job of 
balancing the conflicting goals and achieving something useful.

-- Jeff

> As to the other issues that 5378 addresses, I suspect that a better
> approach will be to fall back to 3978/4748/2026 temporarily and move to
> 5378-bis when it comes rather than to use this very general workaround to
> 5378's issues until 5378-bis is resolved. 3978 etc worked just fine for
> most purposes...

If we reach consensus that the solution to the problem is to change 5378, 
rather than to semi-permanently adopt a workaround such as the trustees 
have proposed, then I would not object to falling back to the older rules 
until the issue is resolved.
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