- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 23:15:19 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Lawrence Rosen <lrosen@rosenlaw.com>
- cc: public-html@w3.org, PSIG <member-psig@w3.org>
On Sat, 5 Mar 2011, Lawrence Rosen wrote: > > **************************** > > Copyright C 2010 W3CR (MIT, ERCIM, Keio). > > W3C liability and trademark rules apply. > > As a whole, this document may be used according to the terms of the W3C > Document License > <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231> . > > In addition, to facilitate implementation of the technical specifications > set forth in this document, anyone may prepare and distribute derivative > works and portions of this document in software, in supporting materials > accompanying software, and in documentation of software, PROVIDED that all > such works include the notice below. The notice is: > > "Copyright C 2010 W3CR (MIT, ERCIM, Keio). This software or document > includes material copied from or derived from [title and URI of the W3C > document]." > > **************************** As this is a new license, it further increases license proliferation, which Google finds objectionable. Secondly, this license does not appear to be GPL-compatible, because it applies additional constraints (e.g. it does not allow the content to be merged into a non-software product). Finally, the terms seem to disallow forking, which misses one of the main reasons for a liberal license, namely, to allow spec forking so as to encourage us to do a good job. In conclusion, it's not clear that this really solve the problem of the W3C HTML spec being under an overly-restrictive license. I highly suggest we simply choose an existing liberal open source license (such as the MIT license) rather than try to create a a new license. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Monday, 7 March 2011 23:15:49 UTC