Subject: Determine the stream of an RFC

From: Freek Dijkstra <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 02:24:06 +0100

The Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents,
http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info/archive/IETF-Trust-License-Policy-20091228.htm,
make an important distinction between documents in the IETF Stream and
documents in Alternative Streams, such as independent submissions.

Given a RFC, how can I determine its stream, and thus its license?

In most cases, I can guess based on the authors, or the category.
However, this will not be fool-proof. For example, RFC 5745 is clearly
part of the IAB stream, thus according to part 8b of the IETF TLP, part
of Alternate Stream. However, it does contain the boilerplate text of 6
b i (for the IETF stream), instead of the boilerplate text of 6 b ii
(for the alternate stream).

Would it be useful to explicitly include the stream in the boilerplate
text of the Copyright Notice section, so that the appropriate license
terms are clear for all readers?

Regards,
Freek Dijkstra

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From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:48:46 -0500

> Given a RFC, how can I determine its stream, and thus its license?

Please see http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5741.txt

The upper left hand corner of the title page tells you the RFC stream.

Russ

---

From: Freek Dijkstra <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:11:47 +0100

> The upper left hand corner of the title page tells you the RFC stream.

Thanks, I missed that one! (and xml2rfc v1.35pre1 still produces the old
headers with "Network Working Group").

Just an observation. I'm trying to create a independent submission I-D
(to register a urn prefix for another standardization body), and with
the fuss on the non-free nature of RFC licenses (derivate works may only
be made within the IETF), I wanted to make sure that contributors in the
other standardization body could freely re-use texts from the RFC for
documents in their standardization body. I found the answer: they can,
but also wanted to make sure this is immediately obvious. The later is
certainly not the case (yet). I found the copyright notice rather vague:
it refers to the TLP, which is not very clear -- you first have to
figure out that the license differs wildly depending on the document
stream, then figure out what the document stream is, which stream the
document in question belongs to, and finally grasp the license rights
for this particular stream. To me this contrasts sharply with let's say
the creative commons license where it is immediately obvious what the
rights are.

Likely is is just me, but I got lost in the document jungle. For
example, I was looking for the correct boilerplate, and read:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/pubprocess.html
http://www.ietf.org/id-info/checklist.html
http://www.ietf.org/id-info/guidelines.html
http://www.rfc-editor.org/indsubs.html
http://www.rfc-editor.org/styleguide.html
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-editor/instructions2authors.txt
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-style-guide/rfc-style
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5377.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5378.txt (BCP78)
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3979.txt (BCP79)
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5744.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4846.txt
http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info/
http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info/archive/IETF-Trust-License-Policy-20091228.htm
http://xml.resource.org/authoring/draft-mrose-writing-rfcs.html

Of course I'm pleased to see Yet Another Helpful Document added to this
List, with the information I was looking for. Perhaps it would be useful
to refer to RFC 5741 from one of these pages above.

With kind regards,
Freek Dijkstra

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From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:05:47 -0500

Internet-Drafts should say "INTERNET-DRAFT" in the upper left corner of 
the title page.  The RFC Editor is the only one that needs to put 
anything else there.

We have some volunteers to update xml2rfc.  They will work to update the 
tool, but it is not preventing the publication of RFCs.

Russ

On 1/17/2010 5:11 AM, Freek Dijkstra wrote:
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