RE: ISSUE-27: rel-ownership - Chairs Solicit Proposals

It would be harmful to the community and the benefits of open standards
to allow a proprietary organization to freely take the results of 
an open standards process, make changes to the standard to advantage
their proprietary technology, and then publish the result as if it 
were the authoritative version of the open standard, in a way that
would confuse users and developers into using the proprietary version
when they were expecting the public one. It would allow and encourage
"embrace and pollute". Whether the standards organization itself
is in a position to pursue remedies is not the issue -- it's the
question of whether this practice is condoned by the community.

"Free Software" is a great when technologies and software can
compete on their technical merit and end-user benefit. But
IANA allowing someone to publish a version of the actual registered
values, but to change the meanings (oh, say, define "ISO-8859-1"
to mean "actually Windows 1252") would be harmful.

So I think it is reasonable to disallow downstream recipients
to make arbitrary changes to registries or registered values.

Perhaps the restrictions go too far in terms of IANA registries,
and should allow Henri to publish the "Henri-registry-set"
which is derived from the IANA registry but includes Henri's
favorite additional values, or which allows downstream users
to do what they want with it (as long as they don't confuse
anyone into think it is the IANA registry) that would be fine,
but I think *some* restrictions are appropriate and reasonable.

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net


-----Original Message-----
From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Julian Reschke
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 4:02 AM
To: Henri Sivonen
Cc: Mark Nottingham; Paul Cotton; Maciej Stachowiak; public-html@w3.org
Subject: Re: ISSUE-27: rel-ownership - Chairs Solicit Proposals

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Jan 22, 2010, at 12:35, Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
>> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>> ...
>>> Last I checked, the general IANA policy was that verbatim distribution of the registry files (with attribution) was permitted, but making changes or permitting downstream recipients to make changes (even if saying that the files have been changed) wasn't permitted. Thus, the IANA registry licensing (as it has been communicated to me by IANA) isn't Free in the Free Software sense.
>>> ...
>> Pointer?
> 
> No pointer. Just private communication from the IANA.
> 
> It would be awesome if they publicly contradicted what I said and made me look foolish by posting a Free as in Free Software policy. :-)

Maybe you should post the question to ietf-discuss, so it's on public 
record over there.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Friday, 22 January 2010 19:30:17 UTC