Re: Draft W3C Excerpt License (Re: WG Decision - spec license use cases)

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:49 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
>>
>> In response to requests from developers to make it easier
>> to include portions of W3C specifications in software documentation,
>> bug reports, code, and test cases, W3C have drafted a new
>> Excerpt & Citation License:
>>    http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2008/06-excerpt-license
>
> Increasing license proliferation is a really bad idea here. I would be
> opposed to introducing yet another license. The legal situation is
> complicated enough as it is. We should just reuse one of the many, many
> existing licenses.

I'm personally actually not very concerned about license
proliferation, though it would always be nice to avoid. However I do
think that the requirement that the license is excruciatingly clear
would be helped a lot by reusing an existing license. Licenses like
cc*, MIT and modified-BSD have received a lot of testing and there is
a lot more certainty and understanding in what they mean than any
newly written license.

So because of this I would recommend reusing an existing license. Or
otherwise use very permissive wording to ensure that there is no
uncertainty.

/ Jonas

* Note that I am not very familiar with the various cc licenses, so
I'm not sure which, if any, of them are compatible with the licenses
that were listed in the original use cases.

Received on Thursday, 5 March 2009 22:30:13 UTC