Re: Copyright of the IDL Definitions

Tobias Peters wrote:
> 
> Here is a question about the copyright issues involved when creating a DOM
> implementation.
> 
> The copyright notice
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/copyright-notice.html forbids the
> creation of "modifications or derivatives". My perception is that the
> creation of a DOM implementation involves making a derivative work of the
> DOM API published in
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/level-one-core.html or
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/idl-definitions.html . These files
> are published under the mentioned copyright notice, so how can any legal
> DOM (level 1) implementation exist?

This is not exactly true. "modifications or derivatives" is about the
document itself. So yes, according to the DOM Level 1 copyright, you had no
right to modify or create derivatives of the DOM Level 1 bindings. It
doesn't prevent you to use them, btw.

> Regarding DOM level 2, there is a distinction between the "document" and
> the "bindings", with the latter being published under a different license
> that permits modifications.

yes, we discovered that the DOM Level 1 document copyright statement is too
restrictive for the bindings (in others words, the copyright for the bindings
in DOM Level 1 was an error). So, following a comment from the Debian
community, we changed the copyright statement to match their requirements
of open source softwares.

> The copyright notice
> http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2/copyright-notice.html explicitly mentions
> the "IDL binding", while the table of contents speeks of "Java Language
> Binding" and "ECMA Script Language Binding", but "IDL Definitions" instead
> of IDL binding. Are these "IDL Definitions" really meant by the term "IDL
> binding", and if they are, could this be made more clear in the level 2
> document?

Good catch, this needs to be synchronized before the REC !

Thank you,
Philippe