Re: Request to move the test repositories to Github

Kris Krueger <krisk@microsoft.com>, 2012-08-08 17:36 +0000:

> I'm not opposed in general to this, though I do think the license issue is a blocker and will need to be addressed.

There is no license issue that I'm aware of. The test suites are all
fully free software with a permissive license:

  http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2008/04-testsuite-copyright

There's nothing in the license which says anything at all about where the
test suites are licensed -- in particular nothing about test suites needing
to be hosted at the W3C, nor even that there needs to be a single canonical
place where test suites need to hosted.

The only thing that's required is for contributors to agree to make their
contributions available under that license, so that we can have a record of
agreement from all the contributors in order to document that all the test
cases are in fact free software (so that others can then use the test
suites freely, and redistribute them freely, and modify them, and
redistribute their modifications, etc.).

We can still ensure that all contributors complete the agreement,
regardless of where the test suites are hosted -- as James noted in an
earlier message on this thread:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-test-infra/2012JulSep/0030.html

  "...other projects use github that require a CLA before contributing
  (e.g.  Django), so it seems that in practice one can successfully use the
  github model and require license agreements to be filled in before
  contributions are accepted."

  --Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike

Received on Thursday, 9 August 2012 01:14:52 UTC