Re: Licensing

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, fantasai wrote:
>> This is not being very helpful. I can add your tests right now under 
>> both the BSD, MIT, or Apache license (or all three) and the W3C Document 
>> License grant, but I cannot add them if you refuse to license them under 
>> the W3C license.
> 
> I want the whole test suite licensed under BSD or MIT (or Apache v2), not 
> just my tests.

I can't make any guarantees, because that depends on whether we can contact
everyone who made a license grant instead of copyright assignment. Judging from
who the authors are, we can probably dual-license most of the tests outside the
CSS1 imports.

To relicense any tests with copyright assignment, we'd have to get permission
from either the W3C or the other copyright holders if it's joint ownership. I
don't yet know which tests would be affected. Either way, it's easier for us to
do that if W3C agrees with what we're doing.

>> If these are the terms of your contribution, you should have mentioned 
>> that in your message in September.
>>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-css-testsuite/2007Sep/0010.html
> 
> At the time I was not aware that the W3C had such a ridiculous policy. 
> Indeed, I would have insisted we change the license on the Selectors test 
> suite many years ago if I had realised the W3C's policy. I only became 
> aware of the issue at the HTML working group F2F meeting, and since that 
> test suite was quickly resolved to be covered by the MIT license, I had no 
> worries that there would be a problem with the CSS tests. Clearly I was 
> mistaken.

The CSS tests have a more complicated legal legacy. Also, I think we'd like
to address the W3C's concerns as well as e.g. Mozilla's, and a policy that
consists solely of "license the tests under MIT" doesn't seem to be sufficient.

>> Arron Eischolz has already put in many hours reviewing your tests to 
>> prep them for adding to the test suite.
> 
> Incidentally, I would recommend anyone reviewing or working with these 
> tests to contact me, so that I can keep their needs in mind. Did Arron 
> find any problems that I should resolve?

He's making a list, and was about 1/3 of the way through when he emailed me
on Dec 14. Many (all?) of your tests are missing section links, so there will
need to be changes if only to add that information.

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2008 23:15:48 UTC