RE: HTML.next and Rechartering

>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.

But companies don't want to commit their intellectual property based on "arbitrary Editor's Drafts".   The current process has a step for opting out patent claims after the first (formal) public draft when there is some idea what the spec is about.  And another at Last Call when it is supposed to be feature complete and when the requirements of the charter were satisfied.  This is always after the last substantive change (because Last Call repeats if necessary).  The actual commitment is only on contents of the final specification.

There isn't a separation between technical contents and legal stages - they are necessarily in synch.

Those are very reasonable places in the process to have this apply.  First draft, last substantive change, final spec.  There can't be a continuous legal review or commitment to random features that come and go - that would be prohibitively expensive.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Aryeh Gregor [mailto:ayg@aryeh.name]
>Sent: Monday, September 12, 2011 10:36 AM
>To: Charles McCathieNevile
>Cc: Silvia Pfeiffer; Sam Ruby; Carr, Wayne; public-html@w3.org
>Subject: Re: HTML.next and Rechartering
>
>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 17:53:28 UTC