Re: Licensing

On Thursday 2008-01-10 22:01 +0100, Rigo Wenning wrote:
> Neither a testsuite nor a specification trying to achieve 
> interoperability is an open-source project. It has different social 

But it would be good if the test suites were used by open source
projects for things like regression testing.  This often requires:

 1) slight or substantial modifications to the tests to fit into a
 regression test framework

 2) permission automatically being granted to any contributor to the
 project under a license equally or less restrictive than that
 project's license, so that anybody can participate in the open
 source project as a tester/developer without asking permission
 (e.g., to improve the test harness, fix bugs in tests, add new
 tests that are variants of old ones, etc.).

> BTW: "you can use under license X" is also true for the Document 
> license as the document license allows for "any use", so it does not 

No it doesn't, since one of the uses "license X" allows is
modification (if it's an open-source license).

For an open-source project to use tests, those tests would need to
be licensed under an appropriate open-source license, which the W3C
document license is not.  If the W3C is willing to license its test
suites under such a license, it should do so rather than saying "ask
us if you want us to do so".  Saying "ask us" doesn't make any sense
since what's needed is a license to *anybody*.  Or, to put it
another way, we're asking you now.


I think the position you're stating effectively means that open
source implementations of standards shouldn't participate in W3C
test suite development, but should instead pool their resources to
work on their own test suite at a different organization with
acceptable licensing.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2008 21:40:33 UTC