Licensing for BNF and WebIDL

This does not affect CR.

The W3C Document License is not sufficient for people to take BNF or 
WebIDL and use it directly by copying it out of the document.  Yet, the 
idea of putting such material in the specs is to make it easier and have 
better compatibility.

The W3C Document License does not permit derived works; that's the point 
of the license for the specification.

The BNF and WedIDL needs to be under the W3C Software License.  This 
isn't a new issue and W3C has a right way to do it:

[[ http://www.w3.org/2011/03/html-license-options.html
W3C already makes it a practice to license IDL portions of a 
specification under the W3C Software License
]]

as shown in

http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Core/copyright-notice.html

http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/ElementTraversal/REC-ElementTraversal-20081222-errata.html#E1

Suggestion:

add that form of licensing to the BNF (and only the BNF), together with 
the WebIDL in JSON-LD API.

 Andy

(An alternative is to put some files up separately but it has it's own 
issues: we have to explain how someone can get the proper bytes, it 
would not be in TR space, and guaranteeing it's in step in the future is 
not possible)

Received on Sunday, 3 November 2013 21:06:31 UTC