Future time zone home

[Tony Finch]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, Eliot Lear wrote:
> On 10/24/10 11:18 AM, SM wrote:
> >
> > Will the contributions fall under "Note Well" rules?
>
> Yes.  That is, people shouldn't expect to make any intellectual property
> claims based on their contributions.

The Note Well rules say the opposite.

The IETF only requires a limited copyright licence that most notably does
not permit the IETF to sublicence any contributions. This isn't sufficient
for the TZ project, since TZ users need to be able to modify and
redistribute it. See RFC 5378 section 5.3 nd 5.4 and note that
sublicensing to the general public is not included.

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/).

Patents are perhaps less of an issue since the TZ project has ignored them
in the past. The IETF's position is marginally stronger: it requires
disclosure of any patents that claim to cover the technology, but it does
not require any licence to the IETF or even a promise to licence to
people using the IETF's work.

I think the IETF's requirements for trademarks are suitable for the TZ
project.


By the way, did you see my earlier message which points out some errors in
your draft's text about licensing?

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/3438


> > I am not suggesting a license change.  The following text is an
> > adaption from RFC 4846:
> >
> >   To the extent that a TZ Contribution or any portion thereof is
> >   protected by copyright and other rights of authorship, the
> >   Contributor, and each named co-Contributor, and the organization
> >   he or she represents or is sponsored by (if any) grant an
> >   irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and
> >   license to the IETF Trust and the IETF under all intellectual
> >   property rights in the TZ Contribution in perpetuity, to copy,
> >   publish, display, and distribute the TZ Contribution.

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.

Tony.
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