Re: License of htmlmathml-f.ent (was Re: correct DOCTYPES to use on MathML 3.0 documents)

On 09/11/2010 18:50, Frédéric WANG wrote:
>
>> All of which is a long way of saying that a browser can safely ignore
>> w3centities-f.ent and just use htmlmathml-f.ent which will give, in
>> the XML code path, an identical set of named entities to the html5
>> parser in the text/html code path.
>>
> I have additional questions regarding the license of htmlmathml-f.ent.
> The W3C license is fine in order to ship the file in Mozilla. However,
> there is a problem with the following clause, which only allows to copy
> the entity names:

I'm not a lawyer but
>
> "Some entity names in this file are derived from files carrying the
>   following notices:
>
>       (C) International Organization for Standardization 1986,1991
>       Permission to copy in any form is granted for use with
>       conforming SGML systems and applications as defined in
>       ISO 8879, provided this notice is included in all copies."
>

I don't think that is actually a licence restriction, it is simply a 
true statement, some of the names do come from the ISO files and those 
files did have that notice. Of course the same is true of the html 
files, which also took the names of the html entites from ISO (but 
without such explicit attribution)

> Does the expression "entity names" refer to the name in comments

No I think it means the name of the entities, but as I say it applies 
equally to the html entities such as the entity name "nbsp" which came 
from ISONUM.

 > (so
> that removing the comments would allow to make the file compatible with
> Mozilla's requirement)?
> Isn't this paragraph contradictory with the W3C license, which does
> allow modifications of the file?

As I say, I don't think that paragraph is a a licence restriction it is 
just a statement of fact.

> Also, I believed that the file was generated from unicode.xml, which
> only mentions the W3C license...


Of course these kind of ambiguous licence texts come from a previous era 
and
a) the ISO is slowly becoming more open to using more open source 
licences and
b) I originally expected that these were going to be a joint W3C/ISO 
publication, but in the end ISO decided to no longer maintain the entity 
sets and explicitly asked the W3C Math WG to maintain them going forward.

So personally I'd have no problem dropping that paragraph, but I think 
I'd better make enquiries at ISO before doing so, to see if there could 
be any objections. However I can't really see them going after every 
system that has the html entity names and checking it mentions ISO 8879.

Is that definitely an official Mozilla position that the current wording 
is unacceptable?

David

Received on Tuesday, 9 November 2010 22:40:18 UTC