- From: Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:41:49 -0500
- To: public-webapps@w3.org
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