HTTP/1.1 RFC copyright statement

[John Cowan]

David Van Horn scripsit:

> Our *intent* has 
> been that these documents, as are the pieces of software contained 
> within them, are free, although this has been a subject of contention.  
> We'd be happy to use a license more widely agreed upon as being a free 
> license, but there are close to 60 documents carrying the current 
> RFC-like statement, and contacting the authors in order to change the 
> statement is infeasible.  

I think you're in a fix here.  You don't really want a specification and
an implementation to be under the same license: an implementation can be
changed as needed (though it then ceases to be a reference implementation),
whereas random changes to a specification are a Bad Thing, as it may then
become hard to tell which is the agreed-on version.

Probably the best you can do is to extract the implementations into
separate files and put them under some suitable license (I would
recommend the Academic Free License), and then get permission to
republish from each of your authors.  That's a pain, but at least
once done it is done.

-- 
I suggest you call for help,                    John Cowan
or learn the difficult art of mud-breathing.    jcowan at reutershealth.com
        --Great-Souled Sam                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan