Hi Eliot, Tony, At 01:28 26-10-10, Eliot Lear wrote:
Yes. That is, people shouldn't expect to make any intellectual property claims based on their contributions.
Tony Finch commented on the "Note Well".
True. This is what we are saying today.
Some of the pointed I mentioned was so that people fully understand what to expect.
In fact I think this text needs to be reworked. I don't think we really CAN or SHOULD change the license terms for something that is either (a) already licensed by someone else or (b) in the public domain. Again, the intent is to maintain the status quo from this regard, but to allow for some future additions that might require some sort of protection (tho what I cannot actually fathom). How about just dropping everything after "license" and inserting ", should one exist"?
Please note that nothing in this message or any message I post on this thread should be considered as legal advice. There are what are called inbound and outbound "rights". (b) falls under outbound "rights". Getting into a licensing discussion or changes to the hosting changes the status quo. That cannot be avoided if this community would like to have a future time zone home. I'll comment on this again below.
I don't understand your intent. I do not want to remove text here without a suggested replacement.
Getting into "competent court orders" opens the way for more problems. The time zone database currently flies under the radar for historical reasons. Creating a structure creates visibility and opens the way for politically correct or other claims. Maybe this is far-fetched.
Changed to:
The IANA will assist the IESG, as required, in filling of the TZ Coordinator,, based on the procedures described above.
Read: let the IESG know if the TZ coordinator has resigned, grant access, revoke access, as required.
Ok. At 03:15 26-10-10, Tony Finch wrote:
I think the TZ project's "Note Well" needs to state that all contributions are in the public domain or equivalently liberal licence (e.g. Creative Commons Zero http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).
It would be good if it said "public domain".
I note that SM's suggested text does not include an equivalent licence to organizations other than the IETF. RFC 4846 says "grant the same license to those organizations and to the community as a whole" which is perhaps broad enough (and, oddly, seems to be more liberal than the IETF contributors' licence).
However this isn't a public domain licence so it *is* a change to the existing TZ licence.
As I mentioned previously, I am not arguing for a change in the license. The text I quoted is not appropriate for "public domain" material. It is more liberal than the IETF contributors' license. It does not try to identify "code", i.e. code falls under the same license as the text. It allows derivative work. In essence, it does not protect the TZ database except for permission to compile and public the original work. I'll adapt some text to elaborate on "rights": "Certain documents, including those produced by the U.S. government and those which are in the public domain, may not be protected by the same copyright and other legal rights as other documents. Nevertheless, we ask each Contributor to grant to the IETF the same rights as he or she would grant, and to make the same representations, as though the IETF Contribution were protected by the same legal rights as other documents, and as though the Contributor could be able to grant these rights. We ask for these grants and representations only to the extent that the Contribution may be protected. We believe they are necessary to protect the IETF all IETF participants and also because the IETF does not have the resources or wherewithal to make any independent investigation as to the actual proprietary status of any document submitted to it." The gist here is to assign rights to avoid legal conundrums. That should allay IETF concerns. I am not sure how to get "public domain" in there if this community wants a formal home to cover everything. If the issues can be separated, it may make matters easier. Some points to consider are: (i) A structure for having a stable TZ coordinator (ii) A distribution mechanism to publish the database and to host the TZ mailing list (iii) How to resolve the licensing issue The structure can be addressed by this BCP or a RFC is the appropriate stream. The distribution mechanism is about selecting a party which acts as a service provider and not one who can claim ownership over the database. The third point depends on the second one. A provider may require clear licensing guidance for obvious reasons. If the distribution mechanism is lightweight, the TZ community could try and get away with "the public-domain time zone database contains code and data that represent the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe." I suggested the RFC Editor site as a continuity of the "long-standing" practice to distribute the TZ database under the current terms. You need buy-in from people who can help make that happen. You can say that messages to the mailing list are placed in the public-domain. If you use the line quoted above for the TZ database, you might be able to get around the licensing issue. The TZ coordinator then oversees the publication of the database. Regards, -sm