Re: Copyright license for ElementTraversal Java interface

I was asked to help understanding what the DOM Working Group did on the
topic of bindings license.

The DOM Working Group made a decision to have the bindings for
ECMAScript, Java, and IDL normative. Thus, we included those in the DOM
specifications itself, as appendices. This was what happened for DOM
Level 1. However, in doing so, this effectively added the bindings under
the W3C Document License, which prevents you to make any kind of changes
at all. This issue was raised by the Debian community at that time,
prior to the publication of DOM Level 2 [1, 2]. The DOM Working Group
discussed it and reemphasized that fact that one cannot make changes in
the interfaces created by the WG, this would go against
interoperability. Even changing the order of arguments in functions
would harm interop in fact. In order to find a compromised solution, we
gave the ability to folks to change the bindings but, for the bindings
who supports package names, they have to be moved out of the "org.w3c"
package. In other words, it's fine to make changes to the bindings but
you need to:
1- document your changes
2- and don't claim your interfaces were done by W3C.

This resolved the issue for the debian community at that time and the
DOM Java interfaces have been distributed by Debian since then. This is
why the DOM Level 2 and 3 specifications have included the software
licenses with a modified statement ever since.

Regards,

Philippe

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/1999OctDec/0147.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-dom/1999OctDec/0153.html

Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2009 16:41:59 UTC