Re: HTML Working Group Decision Policy - for discussion

On Oct 8, 2009, at 2:05 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:

> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> In any case, it seems to me that Change Proposals should come with  
>>> a copyright waiver, assignment or license that makes the Change  
>>> Proposal (if incorporated to a draft) not add restrictions to  
>>> either how the WHATWG licenses spec or how the W3C licenses specs.
>> We did not think of that. The W3C Process document does not seem to  
>> cover copyright assignment or waiver. I am hoping someone from the  
>> W3C Team can advise on what is appropriate here.
>
> A simple statement that the text needs to be something that we can  
> include under whatever license we come up for the deliverables we  
> produce will suffice.
>
> My hope remains that we settle on MIT.  If the W3C and WHATWG can't  
> come to an agreement on a license, then we will need to revisit this  
> -- but then again, we will need to revisit a lot of assumptions, so  
> I would recommend that we cross that bridge when we get to it.

I think the W3C wants to hold copyright on the document, regardless of  
the license, and probably would not want to add the copyright notices  
of individuals. Copyright disclaimer/assignment might be implicit for  
HTML WG members (though I can't find this spelled out anywhere, so I  
don't really know), but from non-members we'd likely need an explicit  
statement of some kind. In addition, we'd probably want anyone  
producing a Change Proposal to agree to the Patent Policy if they  
haven't already. Again, guidance from the Team would be welcome.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 8 October 2009 09:20:39 UTC