Re: The Vocabulary, Schema.org governance, etc.

Hi Renato,

As Dan said, this is a disclaimer that things might change. And they do: we constantly keep extending the schema and revising it in a very careful manner. As the disclaimer further says, some of these changes may not be backward compatible.

I think such a disclaimer is natural for any website hosting an ontology that is expected to change.

Best,
Peter

From: Renato Iannella <ri@semanticidentity.com<mailto:ri@semanticidentity.com>>
Date: Tuesday, September 23, 2014 at 12:15 PM
To: "Yahoo! Inc." <pmika@yahoo-inc.com<mailto:pmika@yahoo-inc.com>>
Cc: Guha <guha@google.com<mailto:guha@google.com>>, W3C Vocabularies <public-vocabs@w3.org<mailto:public-vocabs@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: The Vocabulary, Schema.org governance, etc.

On 22 Sep 2014, at 19:15, Peter Mika <pmika@yahoo-inc.com<mailto:pmika@yahoo-inc.com>> wrote:
Exactly for this reason, we are going to great length trying to 'disown' schema.org<http://schema.org/> ...
The two ways of disowning that we could come up with and implemented so far:

Peter, I don't think that "disown" is the right term, as this implies transfer of ownership (and governance) to another party (or the public domain).
(unless, that was what you were announcing ;-)

In fact, the two updates to the Copyright License and Patent Policy can only be asserted from the _owner_ of the property.

#1 A Creative Commons copyright license
#2 Our commitment to the W3C Patent Policy
The last schema.org<http://schema.org> TOS update was in fact adding #2.

It's important to look at _all_ the terms of the TOS. As the second section then goes on and states:

"The Sponsors reserve the right, at any time, with or without notice to you, to make changes to the Schema, including, without limitation, to make changes that result in your existing Schema content becoming non-compliant with the revised Schema. "


Cheers...
Renato Iannella
Semantic Identity
http://semanticidentity.com
Mobile: +61 4 1313 2206