Re: Adding Web Intents to the Webapps WG deliverables

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote:
> > While issuing a ton of patent exclusions for something like this would be
> rather poor, I would frankly rather have that then a spec that doesn't get
> any attention from a party that's clearly relevant only to have patents come
> up /after/ the spec is published and implemented.
>  Agreed, but for that we need to go through rechartering this group to
> include the new deliverable (i.e., to give everyone a fair chance to say if
> they are willing to give up their IPR around this). I think your concerns
> are fair.
>
> Why do we need to recharter? I don't get the point of having a WG that has
to recharter every single time that we develop a new API. Maybe we should
just stop developing new APIs? The W3C patent policy lets people exclude
things if they so wish, and I don't deny anyone that right. But if we go to
a world where we say "Let's create a new WG for each API" then we get no
benefit out of the W3C whatsoever. We aren't guaranteed wide review of the
APIs, most WGs probably won't have all the relevant people participating,
and so then we will still have all the worries about relevant patents not
being disclosed or licensed, and frankly at that point W3C offers nothing
that WHATWG does not except for a ton of process overhead. If we have to
create a new WG for each new API, I propose we just do it all in WHATWG.