Re: PSA: Sam Ruby is co-Editor of URL spec

On 11/25/14 10:24 PM, Jeff Jaffe wrote:
>
> As it relates to Sam's specific proposal, my understanding is the
> following distinction - which would require legal review.
>
> I believe that there is a concept of a consortium product - that is to
> say a specification that Members worked on together in a Working Group.
> When Members work together on such a product they are agreeing to
> advance the product in W3C.

I'm unable to find specific text in the Draft Member agreement that 
supports this belief.  Furthermore, I note that your statement doesn't 
explicitly state "only" or "exclusively" in W3C.

> As I understand Sam's proposal, each enhancement of the spec is done
> outside of the Working Group.  So the WG never comes together to advance
> the specification.  Instead, the work is done outside; and by agreement
> it is brought into the W3C after it has been completed.

Based on this discussion, I plan to write up a proposal for legal 
review.  It probably won't be ready until after the Thanksgiving Holiday 
weekend.

To help scope the discussion, I'll explicitly limit the proposal to the 
URL specification, and to a time period (say 2015-2016).

To ensure that everything is explored, I'll adopt the definitions of 
"Contributor" and "Contribution" from the Apache License, Version 
2.0[1], and state that there should be no barrier to any employees of a 
W3C Member company or Invited Expert participating as a Contributor in 
this effort.  In fact, I'll go further, and say that it is a desirable 
goal that as many of the Contributors as possible be employees of W3C 
Member companies or Invited Experts, for IPR commitment purposes.

It may very well be that the outcome of the legal review is that this 
effort is not to be viewed as a consortium product, and I'm entirely OK 
with that.  What is important is that the develop and any proposals 
branches[2] be licensed under terms that enable this work to be done at 
the WHATWG and/or synchronized with the WHATWG.  To be clear: this isn't 
intended as an option to be exercised if things break down, the plan is 
to actively keep the WHATWG specification up to date throughout this 
process.  And equally importantly, the output of this effort will be 
regular releases that demonstrably meet all of W3Cs requirements for a 
Recommendation.

- Sam Ruby

[1] http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html
[2] https://specs.webplatform.org/#how

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 2014 12:08:56 UTC