Re: Renewing Working Groups, a proposal

> On Jun 3, 2015, at 0:46 , Carine Bournez <carine@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Jun 02, 2015 at 09:46:01AM -0700, David Singer wrote:
>> 
>> A group operates under charter A and produces Working Drafts for which the members have Exclusion Opportunities.
>> 
>> The charter expires, and a new charter B is written which documents continuing work on those documents is in scope.
> 
> When you say 'new charter B', you mean the WG name is changed from WG A to WG B?

No, I mean that the charter expired, and a new charter was written and approved.  This is the ‘long-lived supergroups’ question.

> Now, W3C Member Q, who was not a member of the WG under charter A, joins the WG under charter B, before that WG has produced any new Working Drafts.
>> Does Q have an exclusion opportunity for the WDs produced under Charter A, and hence an agreement to license, or not?
> 
> Upon joining a WG, a member has obligations wrt published items. If nothing
> is published yet in that WG, there is no obligation yet. So if charters A and
> B are for the same group, then everything published under charter A is covered
> by patent commitment (possibly exclusion).

Well, that is the question that has been on the table for a long time.  If a charter expires, and a new charter is written for a group of the same name, and it is approved, and people have to re-affirm their commitment and re-join, in what senses is it ‘the same group’?

PSIG has been divided on this question.  Chaals’ feels that it is the same for general purposes;  I think it’s basically irrelevant for the purposes of the Patent Policy, except for this one wrinkle, which is easily dealt with.

> If charters A and B are for different groups (i.e. deliverable transferred 
> from group A to group B), then the exclusion opportunity is similar to a FPWD
> as soon as group B publishes the document again.

Right, as soon as there is an exclusion opportunity under charter B, we’re all clean. So the easy way to handle this situation (‘inherited drafts’) is to trigger an exclusion opportunity at the earliest possible moment. If you do that as the group forms, then everyone joining will have an exclusion opportunity as they join.

David Singer
Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Wednesday, 3 June 2015 15:47:56 UTC