Subject: The new 3667/8 template and inactive authors.

From: Bill Sommerfeld <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:08:04 -0400

My WG has some documents with listed authors who are no longer
actively involved in the production of the document.  In particular,
they're responsible for large chunks of the document but have since
moved on for various reasons not worth discussing here.

The current document editor is, of course, reluctant to:

 a) remove the above-the-title name (from a giving credit where credit
 is due perspective).

 b) .. or submit a document without hearing back from the older author
 that they consent to this verbiage:

>    By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any
>    applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware
>    have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes
>    aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of RFC
>    3668.

Given the time of year, the inactive author(s) may be on an extended
vacation.

Any suggestions on what to do here?

						- Bill

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:19:54 +0200

Bill, I'm not a lawyer etc etc, but it seems to me that dormant authors
have always been a problem, even with the old boilerplate. It's just
a bit harder to ignore the new boilerplate (which was the reason for
making it more explicit). I see three choices for dealing with
dormant authors

- downgrade them to an Acknowledgement
- wait until they wake up
- take the risk that they later repudiate the boilerplate

(That risk seems pretty low to me, since they must certainly have
agreed to RFC 2026/RFC 3668 conditions at the time they were active
authors.)

    Brian