Subject: License File for Open Source Repositories

From: IESG Secretary <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2016 07:36:53 -0800

The IESG has observed that many working groups work with open source
repositories even for their work on specifications. That's great, and
we're happy to see this development, as it fits well the working style
of at least some of our working groups. This style is also likely to be
more popular in the future.

As always, we'd like to understand areas where we can either be helpful
in bringing in some new things such as tooling, or where we need to
integrate better between the repository world and the IETF process. As
an example of the latter, we're wondering whether it would be helpful to
have a standard boilerplate for these repositories with respect to the
usual copyright and other matters. The intent is for such text to be
placed in a suitable file (e.g., "CONTRIBUTING"), probably along with
some additional information that is already present in these files in
many repositories. The idea is that people should treat, e.g., text
contributions to a draft-foo.xml in a repository much in the same way as
they treat text contributions on the list, at least when it comes to
copyright, IPR, and other similar issues.

We have worked together with the IETF legal team and few key experts
from the IETF who are actively using these repositories, and suggest the
following text.

We're looking to make a decision on this matter on our January 19th,
2017 IESG Telechat, and would appreciate feedback before then. This
message will be resent after the holiday period is over to make sure it
is noticed. Please send comments to the IESG ([email-masked]) by 2017-01-17.

The IESG

——

This repository relates to activities in the Internet Engineering Task
Force(IETF). All material in this repository is considered Contributions
to the IETF Standards Process, as defined in the intellectual property
policies of IETF currently designated as BCP 78
(https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/bcp78), BCP 79
(https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/bcp79) and the IETF Trust Legal
Provisions (TLP) Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/trust-legal-provisions.html).

Any edit, commit, pull-request, comment or other change made to this
repository constitutes Contributions to the IETF Standards Process. You
agree to comply with all applicable IETF policies and procedures,
including, BCP 78, 79, the TLP, and the TLP rules regarding code
components (e.g. being subject to a Simplified BSD License) in
Contributions.