Re: Draft W3C Community Group IPR policy for your consideration

On 30 Sep 2010, at 9:50 AM, Karl Dubost wrote:

> Ian,
>
> A few comments.

Thank you, Karl. I've taken into account your concrete suggestions and  
revised the document in place.

Meanwhile, the main policy question you raise is:

  * Why does this policy push for organizational commitments when  
people want to participate as individuals?

[snip]

>>
>> **Note:** If an individual participant is unemployed, the  
>> individual signs the
>> Contributor Agreement.
>
>
> I might have misunderstood the criteria, but…
>
> One of the shoe stone for participants to groups at W3C is when you  
> are employed by let say a big corporate, Acme VoiceTech Inc., with a  
> big patent portfolio but you want to participate as an *individual*.  
> (The person could be a Webmaster of this company, or the accountant  
> who just happen to be passionate about Web technologies).

This is a tough one. It's individuals v. lawyers.

Here's what I've heard:

  * Individual's may want to participate but in many companies, they  
aren't allowed to make any sort of individual commitment since the  
company owns the IPR.
  * Individual commitments aren't worth anything, so getting  
individual commitments is not interesting or important.
  * Unless you have organizational commitments, some parties won't  
participate.

So the approach taken here is:

  * Work really hard to get organizational commitments (which will  
make life easier right away (for implementers) and later as well (for  
getting commitments over the full spec from organizations). Make the  
organizational commitment easy (just for contributions, and other  
limitations on grants as described in the OWF licenses).
  * If the individual can't get an organizational licensing commitment  
say "no grant".

  _ Ian

>
>> #### Other Commitments on Joining
>>
>>  * All individuals agree to W3C's Conflict of Interest Policy. For  
>> instance,
>> if an individual's employment status changes while participating in  
>> the
>> Community Group, the individual must inform W3C. W3C may request  
>> that the new
>> employers sign the CA.
>
> Same comment than above, your employment history might limit your  
> participation. You are in a very small company, or unemployed then  
> you join a big company in a department not related to Web stuff for  
> your daily job and you still want to participate. You can't anymore.
>
> Would it be possible to just say "I'm employed by this company but I  
> participate individually"? It raises a red flag to the community  
> group, saying there is a risk without totally blocking participation.

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Thursday, 30 September 2010 18:40:02 UTC