Re: Draft W3C Excerpt License (Re: WG Decision - spec license use cases)

Phillippe--

Re: License proliferation, and speaking as an AC  Rep: Is there a
good reason W3C  is spending legal resources creating a new
license?

Placing aside the added costs that this creates through the rest
of the eco-system over time with respect to having to  understand
and work with a new license, I believe it's a source of expense
that W3C  could avoid in these hard times by reusing one of the
suggested license such as the MIT-style license (for goodness
sake, W3C  is located at MIT:-))---

As a paying member, I'd like to strongly request at this point
that the Team simply propose an existing license that is deemed
suitable, rather than continuing to expend resources on drafting
a new license.
Also, please be prepared to share with us at the upcoming AC
meeting how much W3C has spent to date on the license drafting
effort, and the justification for that expense.

Jonas Sicking writes:
 > On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:49 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
 > > On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
 > >>
 > >> In response to requests from developers to make it easier
 > >> to include portions of W3C specifications in software documentation,
 > >> bug reports, code, and test cases, W3C have drafted a new
 > >> Excerpt & Citation License:
 > >> $(ÿ > >
 > > Increasing license proliferation is a really bad idea here. I would be
 > > opposed to introducing yet another license. The legal situation is
 > > complicated enough as it is. We should just reuse one of the many, many
 > > existing licenses.
 > 
 > I'm personally actually not very concerned about license
 > proliferation, though it would always be nice to avoid. However I do
 > think that the requirement that the license is excruciatingly clear
 > would be helped a lot by reusing an existing license. Licenses like
 > cc*, MIT and modified-BSD have received a lot of testing and there is
 > a lot more certainty and understanding in what they mean than any
 > newly written license.
 > 
 > So because of this I would recommend reusing an existing license. Or
 > otherwise use very permissive wording to ensure that there is no
 > uncertainty.
 > 
 > / Jonas
 > 
 > * Note that I am not very familiar with the various cc licenses, so
 > I'm not sure which, if any, of them are compatible with the licenses
 > that were listed in the original use cases.

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

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Received on Friday, 6 March 2009 22:13:34 UTC