Re: Spec license

On Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:24:36 +0100, Philip Taylor <pjt47@cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> Karl Dubost wrote:
>> 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.
>>  So far I see
>>  * 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
>>  Something else?
>
> * Creating a new competing specification for an HTML-like language,  
> without the permission of the W3C, and being able to reuse and modify  
> text from the original HTML 5 spec to avoid wasted effort.

As long as it is clear that this is what is being done, then I agree that  
it is a useful use case to support.

It may be that in practice the way to do that is with a copyright  
restriction that makes certain demands, but this should remain possible,  
and effectively W3C should support evolution of HTML, including  
exploratory development of specs outside W3C. Ideally those would be  
brought back to W3C as happened with HTML5, but there should not be such a  
precondition - just a requirement of clarity about what any spec happens  
to be.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 18:26:11 UTC