- From: Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 09:20:23 -0400
- To: "Martin J. Dürst" <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
- CC: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, Addison Phillips <addison@lab126.com>, "public-i18n-core@w3.org" <public-i18n-core@w3.org>, Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org>, Rigo Wenning <rigo@w3.org>
On 10/3/2013 3:42 AM, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote: > [www-international@w3.org removed; Philippe Le Hegaret, Rigo Wenning, > and Jeff Jaffe added because they might have some more background info > on this.] Thanks for including me. I don't have insight on Anne's concerns. The background, as I suppose people know, is that in response to Mozilla's request we have now included a capability to fork W3C specifications in certain circumstances. I believe that the FAQ is trying to make the simple point that if "standards" are regularly "forked" we will have a world with fragmentation and little standardization. Perhaps there is some wording of the FAQ that Anne objects to, and I'm open to discussing that. > > > 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 13:20:46 UTC