Re: Spec license

On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) wrote:
> 
> I should add that I do not necessarily consider this a problem : if the 
> licence under which extant W3C specifications have been released has 
> posed no problems so far, I am unclear why it is now thought necessary 
> to release the HTML 5 specification under a different licence.

The current license has in fact caused a number of problems, such as Henri 
being "warn[ed]" on behalf of W3C lawyers, Henri not being able to use 
spec text from SVG and MathML, and people not being able to use W3C spec 
text in forked versions of specs (e.g. the HTML5 effort had to start 
from scratch rather than re-using any of the existing HTML4 spec text).

I think Henri's list is a very good summary of the issues and use cases:

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Feb/0093.html

I agree with Henri that it seems CC licenses actually wouldn't cut it for 
many of the use cases, and join him in supporting the MIT license for this 
purpose. (This is a change from my earlier position.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 4 February 2009 10:08:55 UTC