- From: Aryeh Gregor <ayg@aryeh.name>
- Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:35:42 -0400
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Cc: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>, "Carr, Wayne" <wayne.carr@intel.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com> wrote: > Indeed. It might be that this group suggests to W3C at large that Last Call > has sufficient problems that W3C should investigate de-coupling it from a > crucial point of Patent Policy. Although that will take time, and the > discussion is larger than the HTML WG. More specifically, progression along the REC track currently has mostly technical requirements but mostly legal implications. This is bad, because it means that technical decisions are being made on legal (non-technical) grounds. For legal purposes, we need to create immutable snapshots of some type that the patent policy will apply to. But requiring two interoperable implementations of every feature in the snapshot before the patent policy applies doesn't make sense. Instead, the snapshots should just be taken of arbitrary Editor's Drafts without technical review. That serves the legal purposes just as well -- if there are even gross technical errors, that doesn't affect the utility to the patent policy. If we also want some type of technical stabilization process for whatever reason, then we could have that too. But it shouldn't be related to the patent policy.
Received on Monday, 12 September 2011 17:36:42 UTC