Re: Spec license

Le 4 févr. 2009 à 03:42, Henri Sivonen a écrit :
> The "warn[ing]" was quickly retracted,

I stick to my proposal. Make a table of what people consider being use  
cases (some of them might not be legit but we will discover that  
later.). It should satisfy the advocates of "solving real world  
problems" and not creating answers.

Many thanks for these use cases, I guess we start to have good  
materials to show to real lawyers.

>> 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

> * Copying the prose defining an algorithm, pasting it verbatim or  
> with modifications into source code of a program as comments and  
> writing an implementation of the algorithm (possibly making creative  
> optimizations) so that the spec text and the statements of the  
> programming language intermingle. The resulting program should be  
> licensable under the MIT license without additional terms. (For  
> algorithms contained in "HTML 5", this use case is addressed by the  
> WHATWG license, but relying on that means that the W3C instance of  
> HTML5 can't be treated as the canonical instance. I'm already  
> exercising this option on the source code of the Validator.nu HTML  
> Parser under the WHATWG spec license.)
>
> * Extracting parts of a spec and showing the extracts verbatim or  
> with modifications in the user interface of a validator. The  
> validator as a whole including its UI strings should be Open Source  
> and should be suitable for packaging in popular GNU system  
> distributions including Debian. Both distributing a copy of the spec  
> text and a program for extracting pieces of it at runtime and  
> distributing preprocessed extracts should be permitted. Showing a  
> copyright notice on in the documentation of the validator is  
> acceptable, but showing a copyright notice or other legal legends in  
> the UI whenever a spec extract appears would not be acceptable. (I'm  
> already doing this in Validator.nu under the WHATWG spec license.  
> However, I'd be interested in having the option to do this with the  
> authoring guide/reference deliverables of the WG and with the SVG  
> and MathML specs.)
>
> * Extracting the WebIDL parts of the spec and incorporating them  
> verbatim or with modifications into the source code trees of  
> implementations of the spec. Such inclusion should not interfere  
> with LGPLv2.1 or later (Gecko, WebKit), GPLv2 or later (Gecko), MPL  
> 1.1 or later (Gecko), Apache Software License 2.0 (Batik) or the  
> licensing models of Opera and IE.
>
> * Extracting the CSS parts of the spec and incorporating them  
> verbatim or with modifications into the source code trees of  
> implementations of the spec. Such inclusion should not interfere  
> with LGPLv2.1 or later (Gecko, WebKit), GPLv2 or later (Gecko), MPL  
> 1.1 or later (Gecko), Apache Software License 2.0 (Batik) or the  
> licensing models of Opera and IE.
>
> * Copying prose from the spec and pasting it verbatim or with  
> modifications into comments or accompanying documentation of a test  
> case and checking the test case into the source tree of any of the  
> above-mentioned software projects plus html5lib without interfering  
> with their licensing or choice of project hosting.
>
> * Continuing the development of the WG deliverables in a non-W3C  
> venue if the W3C or the HTML WG cease operations.
>
> * Forking some or all of the WG deliverables and pursuing an  
> alternative development path outside the W3C even without the W3C or  
> the HTML WG ceasing operations. (That is, I think what Rob Burns is  
> doing on the HTML4All wiki should be allowed.)
>
> I believe licensing the spec under the MIT license[2] would address  
> all the above use cases to my satisfaction.
>
> Additional use cases that I think are worthwhile but that I'm less  
> interested in advocating personally:
>
> * Taking WG deliverables in whole or part and repurposing content  
> into a book that is given gratis or sold on paper or as a digital  
> file.
>
> * Using extracts from WG deliverables in documentation published on  
> developer.mozilla.org.
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitations_and_exceptions_to_copyright
> [2] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php


-- 
Karl Dubost
Montréal, QC, Canada
http://twitter.com/karlpro

Received on Wednesday, 4 February 2009 12:18:39 UTC