just a thought to it:
As far as I understand it, the boilerplate copyright notice and license at the end of all RFCs since somewhere in the 2200's is not DFSG-free.
Quick simply, it fails rule #3, (http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines)
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
with the following part of the boilerplate:
However, this document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than English.
Or at least, that's how I read it. It was discussed on the Debian developers mailing list a while ago, and the result was that this boilerpate is not DFSG-free, but the copyright on previous RFCs (which is in a different file, I really should include that in the Debian copyright file) _is_ DFSG-free.
ok, i certainly do not want to kick on the discussion and i'm not an expert for IPR and licensies, but somehow it seems very dumb to me to want to modify the text of the standard track. IETF's standard tracks are free standards open for everybody (for implementations) but the standard text itself shouldn't be modified. Or, if you do so, you should understand that you are no more compliant to the latter. that's the whole idea of a standard anyway, whoever writes it down.
so, in my opinion we have a misinterpretation here. the cited IETF note protects the standard as such and _not_ the copyrights of the authors, that's not the point. for debian, the most important thing is to be able to modify provided software source code and _not_ the standards it's based upon. why would you want to do that??? and: you can do so anyway and with every standard, there are no rules on this matter (if there were, the world would be so nice with everybody fully compatible, oh dear! :-)), you generally just lose your interoperability. what IETF says, is, you can't take this document, change some lines and say it's still IETF's RFC. that's ok for me.
so, i personally still don't get it, but i understand that if debian policy has been defined such as not to accept the RFCs, we can't do much about it... well - we are not going to have a lot of up-to-date debian software soon, are we? kind of suicide statement for me.
ciao artur
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