[whatwg] Change of copyright notice

It took a while, but we finally have all the lawyers happy (to the last 
piece of punctuation) and the header of the WHATWG specs has been updated 
to read:

   (c) Copyright 2004 Apple Computer, Inc., Mozilla Foundation, and Opera 
   Software ASA.
   You are granted a license to use, reproduce and create derivative works 
   of this document.

The change being that the specs are now joint-copyright between Apple, 
Mozilla, and Opera, so that if any one organisation goes "dark side", the 
spec isn't at risk. Since one of the three copyright holders is a 
non-profit organisation with no shareholders, and since the other two 
companies are competitors, it is unlikely that all three copyright holders 
would ever all agree to changing this copyright notice unless it was in 
the interests of the Web (in fact, given that it took over two months for 
the three groups to agree to a six word change, I wouldn't really worry 
about it ever changing again unless it is for the copyright to be assigned 
to another standards organisation).

This should resolve the various concerns people have raised about the 
copyright status of the specs. Specifically, we received feedback saying 
that the specs should be copyrighted by more than one vendor, and feedback 
saying that it should be copyright by at least one non-commercial entity. 
Both of these conditions have now been met.

I shall now be resuming work responding to comments and editing the spec.

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

Received on Monday, 8 November 2004 15:49:39 UTC