Re: Draft HTML5 licensing survey

On Apr 26, 2011, at 7:35 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Apr 26, 2011, at 10:05 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:
>> 
>>> On 04/26/2011 12:11 PM, James Graham wrote:
>>>> On 04/26/2011 05:58 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> While some sort of accommodation for input relating to additional
>>>>> options is likely to be in the next draft of the poll; a specific option
>>>>> for MIT is not likely to be included as we have yet to have somebody
>>>>> specifically advocate for that option.
>>>> 
>>>> On 04/25/2011 05:33 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>>>> Specifically, I
>>>>> expect poll survey from Apple representatives would support an MIT
>>>>> license but not CC0.
>>>> 
>>>> You may not consider this as "advocacy" but it is enough to suggest that
>>>> including CC0 (which has clearly been advocated) but not MIT (which has
>>>> merely been "supported") would result in significant information loss.
>>> 
>>> Maciej understands and agrees to the bar as I stated it.
>>> 
>>> There are plenty of licenses that various people have considered and rejected for one reason or another.  We are not going to enumerate all of them, even if somebody may expect that their company might support one or more of these options.
>> 
>> To be totally clear, I did *not* intend to explicitly advocate for MIT license, either on my own behalf or on behalf of Apple. I drew the distinction because I wanted to avoid a situation where a question would say "CC0 or MIT", which would be hard for Apple to respond to.
> 
> 
> Maybe a general question if people would support a license that allows
> forking would be appropriate with a text field that asks for a
> suggestion on the most appropriate license and another one with a list
> of unacceptable licenses.

That seems like it would be hard to answer, since it's unclear what licenses would be under consideration, and a list of all that would be unacceptable is potentially infinite. For example, should everyone explicitly say that GPL would not be acceptable? It does allow forking, but couldn't be used by any popular browser implementations.

I think it is better to stick to specific licenses that at least one person is willing to advocate for consideration. This is a pretty low bar. Folks who want the MIT license or any other forking-enabled included should just say so, and the Chairs will take that under advisement.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2011 02:42:01 UTC