Re: Encoding Standard

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