Re: Spec license

Karl Dubost wrote:
> I have difficulties to understand why it is not possible with the 
> current W3C Document License. What you are doing is not a derivative 
> work nor a full copy of the document, but just quotations of it, which 
> is already authorized by the document license.

It's authorized if you include the link to the spec, the copyright 
notice, and the status of the W3C document on every single quote, 
assuming I read 
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231 
correctly.

Since this requirement is stricter than the MIT license requirements for 
attribution (found at 
<http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php>), once you have 
done this the resulting source code may no longer be licensed under the 
MIT license.

> Maybe we should first identify what are the use cases and see if the set 
> of licenses, we have from W3C Document Licenses to others, covers or not 
> the use cases.

That sounds good, yeah.

> * Publishing the full or parts of a specification in a book to be sold.
> * Include prose of the specification in software from proprietary to 
> complete open source

Publishing the full or parts of a specification in a book or other 
medium not to be sold (e.g. a web tutorial)?

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "complete open source" here.  I 
don't think, for example, that inclusion of the specification prose in 
public-domain software is compatible with having any copyright license 
at all.  I suspect that's not a use case we want to worry about, however.

-Boris

Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 15:51:14 UTC