Call for Review: Proposal to Relicense Contacts API, Messaging API and Telephony API Specifications

Hello,

Today the W3C Advisory Committee Representatives received a Proposal to  
license the Contacts API, Messaging API and Telephony API Specifications,  
following a request[1] the W3C Director received on 30 March.

Pursuant to the W3C Policy on Relicensing Unfinished W3C
Specifications[2], the Director proposes to relicense the Specifications
and sent this call for review to the Advisory Committee.

A. The Specifications to be relicensed are the entire latest editors'
drafts of:
   1. Contacts API [3][4]
   2. Messaging API [5][6]
   3. Telephony API [7][8]
(Links are provided to the latest published draft in /TR/ and to the
editors' draft for each.)

The Director has determined that the Specifications are eligible to be
relicensed, as the SysApps WG has expired without publishing them as
Recommendations; the material has not previously been published in a W3C
Recommendation; W3C has not announced a plan for any other WG to take up
this work; and there is no evidence the Specifications were abandoned
due to patent licensing concerns.

B. Intel Corporation, a participant in the SysApps WG, requested the
relicense. The stated rationale:
> Intel Corporation contributed the initial specs which we had developed 
> for use in Tizen and Crosswalk.  The specifications have now been 
> abandoned by the SysApps WG (see below) and we want to be able to 
> continue to work on these outside the WG.

C. While the charter of the SysApps WG expired 1 October 2014, editors
and list-members supported relicensing of the Specifications.[9]

D. The Director proposes to relicense the Specifications under a choice
of license: CC-BY [10] W3C Software License[11] or BSD
2-clause license[12]. In the event that W3C chooses a default permissive
license during or after this relicensing, W3C will also make the
Specifications available under such license.

E. Members may provide feedback on this relicensing proposal via a Web  
form and the public may provide feedback on the  
public-review-announce@w3.org mailing list [13]. The deadline to do so is  
23:59, Boston time on 2015-05-05.


For Tim Berners-Lee, Director,
Wendy Seltzer, W3C Counsel;
Coralie Mercier, Acting Head of W3C Marketing & Communications


[1]  
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-review-announce/2015Apr/0000.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2014/12/relicense.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-contacts-manager-api-20130307/
[4] http://www.w3.org/2012/sysapps/contacts-manager-api/
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-messaging-20130516/
[6] http://www.w3.org/2012/sysapps/messaging/
[7] http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-telephony-20130620/
[8] http://www.w3.org/2012/sysapps/telephony/
[9] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sysapps/2015Mar/0020.html
[10] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
[11] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
[12] http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause
[13] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-review-announce/



-- 
  Coralie Mercier  -  W3C Communications Team  -  http://www.w3.org
mailto:coralie@w3.org +336 4322 0001 http://www.w3.org/People/CMercier/

Received on Tuesday, 7 April 2015 14:28:59 UTC