RE: An article on a different type of light weight standards development process

Hi Andy,

 

I'm confused about the word "standards" in the subject of your email: "RE:
An article on a different type of light weight standards development
process". Probably that is because I am a software lawyer, familiar now with
"The Apache Way", with not much experience at W3C.

 

In Open Web Foundation and for the light-weight standards we are trying to
support in that venue, the distinctions between standards and software are
blurred. As we see it, engineers write software to prototype and document
what they subsequently incorporate into standards. Or vice versa. (Some of
us describe it informally as "standard setting in a bar setting.")
Ultimately many of the words of those standard specifications are embedded
into software implementations and its documentation, with little regard to
what is "text" and what is "code" or which came first. 

 

W3C needs a way for such informal creative efforts to thrive within a
structured and permissive and supportive environment. In this context, the
arbitrary distinctions between specifications and software, which are
invisible by merely looking at it anyway, become particularly unhelpful.
Therefore, for ease of analysis, I propose that we view the intellectual
property portions of this W3C Incubation effort as an open source software
licensing transaction (or set of transactions) in the form of license grants
for copyrightable (code and text) contributions turned into published
specifications, and for associated patent claims. 

 

If you can identify other specific salient characteristics of specifications
that are different from mere software, perhaps we can discuss ways to get
around such distinctions. For example, there are ways to prevent any final
W3C specification itself from being forked, even without inhibiting free
software. PSIG is considering such a license for HTML5 specifications which,
if done right, will contain both free code and free text when they are
published.

 

At a conference in Helsinki last week, I learned a new term: "Agile
Development". (New to me, at least!!!) I was too busy talking in another
track to learn much about it, but the general idea seems to be that
engineers and their managers are finding ways to be nimble, with as little
up-front legal and process burden as possible, while they invent and market
successful products. Larger companies are aware of IP risks, of course, but
they don't want their employees' inventiveness to be delayed by up-front
standards scoping or by lengthy reviews of potential patent commitments. So
we lawyers need to create new models by which software and specifications
grow faster than lawyers can keep up with. And also everyone agrees that, at
least for these agile standards, they must be royalty free for both open
source and proprietary implementations. 

 

That's what I visualize in a light-weight W3C standards process.

 

Best regards,

 

/Larry

 

 

Lawrence Rosen

Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com) 

3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482

Cell: 707-478-8932

Apache Software Foundation, member and counsel (www.apache.org) 

Open Web Foundation, board member (www.openwebfoundation.org) 

Stanford University, Instructor in Law

Author, Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property
Law (Prentice Hall 2004)

 

 

 

From: public-vision-newstd-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-vision-newstd-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Andrew.Updegrove@gesmer.com
Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2010 12:21 PM
To: public-vision-newstd@w3.org; public-vision-newstd-request@w3.org
Subject: An article on a different type of light weight standards
development process

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