Re: CfC: publish WD of XHR; deadline November 29

On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, David Bruant wrote:
>
> The intent is clear: the WHATWG publishes documents in the public domain 
> for very good reason. Anyone (W3C included!) can reuse them under close 
> to no condition, not even credit.

I can speak pretty authoritatively to the intent, if that's what you are 
interested in.

The relevant philosophy in the WHATWG context is multi-pronged:

1: Specs should be reusable in software, documentation, tutorials, and the 
like, without any barrier, whether free software or proprietary software, 
whether in books printed for money or FAQs that are themselves free to 
copy, whether in online courses with $10,000 entry fees or demos on 
street corners that are organised by marketing departments.

2: A spec author can "go bad" without realising it, so it should be 
possible to fork a specification if that happens, without the author 
having any control over this.

3: Forking specifications, publishing multiple copies of specifications, 
and publishing easy-to-find-with-a-search-engine snapshots of 
specifications, are all things that hurt interoperability by making 
implementors reference different requirements. The only time that forking 
a specification is justified is #2 above.

We use open licenses on our specifications because of #1 and #2. We can't 
legally prevent #3 while allowing #1 and #2, so we rely on common sense 
and good faith to achieve #3.

HTH,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 25 November 2012 20:38:45 UTC