Re: Encoding Standard

[www-international@w3.org removed; Philippe Le Hegaret, Rigo Wenning, 
and Jeff Jaffe added because they might have some more background info 
on this.]


Hello Anne,

This is a purely personal contribution.


On 2013/10/03 16:25, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> On 2013/10/02 6:18, Asmus Freytag wrote:
>> On 10/1/2013 1:27 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> Given http://www.w3.org/2013/09/html-faq#shouldifork I'm no longer
>>> okay with this group publishing a copy of the Encoding Standard. That
>>> would be hypocritical.
>>>
>>>
>> Can you elaborate?

Yes, please.


Looking at http://www.w3.org/2013/09/html-faq#shouldifork, I personally 
came up with the following possible interpretations of your statement, 
but none of these really made much sense to me, so I think I must be 
missing something.

Possible interpretations I came up with:

- You think that publishing a copy is forking. As far as I understand, 
by all intents and purposes, there is no plan of forking, but the plan 
is to keep things in sync. Making copies e.g. for packaging,... is 
widely done in the open source community, and isn't called forking. The 
term forking is only used when there is on-purpose technical divergence.

- You think that forking is a good idea, the more, the merrier, and 
therefore disagree with the paragraph in question. I have to admit that 
I personally can't disagree with the statement "Forking a specification 
imposes high costs, and is therefore not recommended.". That's a 
statement that applies to any kind of open source or similar project, 
and even more to interoperability standards. That doesn't exclude 
forking when it is really necessary, but that should happen very rarely.

- You like that forking is now allowed in the HTML WG, and so you'd 
prefer that the encoding spec (http://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/) be 
published by the HTML WG, not by the I18N WG. In that case, why not just 
say so? (The alternative would be to apply the same licensing experiment 
to the I18N WG, but that probably would take quite some time.)

- The spec in question says it's licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal 
(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) and Open Web 
Foundation Agreement Version 1.0 
(http://www.openwebfoundation.org/legal/the-owf-1-0-agreements/owfa-1-0). I 
haven't analysed these licenses, and not being a lawyer, I wouldn't be 
suited to do so. However, my understanding is that these are very 
permissive licenses, most probably to the extent that a message like 
yours above would not have any legal force. Of course, the WG may be 
inclined to follow your preferences, but I'd expect a somewhat different 
wording of the request in that case.


As I said above, I'm probably missing something, so clarification is 
really appreciated.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Thursday, 3 October 2013 07:43:52 UTC