Subject: RE: Assuring ISOC commitment to AdminRest

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 18:43:54 -0500

On Sunday, December 12, 2004 16:19:39 -0500 Scott Bradner <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> whatever the merits of Pete's suggestion I think John makes a very
> important point when he says that it would be better to refer to a RFC by
> number rather than a BCP by number (and title) because the text can
> change while keeping the same BCP number (wwhich can not happen for
> RFCs) - this means that the IETF could (in theory) change the rules
> later on and bind to the ISOC to someting they did not get a chance
> to agree to.

Indeed, this is a critical point.  While in theory an IETF process BCP 
cannot be amended without an ISOC BoT resolution, it is still the case that 
formal commitments of the sort we are asking ISOC to make should involve 
stable references, not mutable ones.

This is actually a problem which I recently noticed with RFC3667, which
requires the following notice to be included in IETF documents:

      "Copyright (C) The Internet Society (year).  This document is
      subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP
      78, and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their
      rights."

This has the effect of reserving to the authors any rights not granted
to the IETF or ISOC and which the IETF does not later decide it wants to
grab by amending the BCP.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[email-masked]>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA

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