Re: W3C Excerpt and Citation license

Thank you both for the comments, adding Ian and Rigo who I should have
had copied initially.

Copy of the thread starts at 

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/thread.html#msg20

Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> wrote:
>> One problematic part seem to be (my emphasis):
>> 
>>   Permission to copy, to use, to create derivatives of parts of the work
>>   (but not the entire work), or to create extended citations or
>>   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>   excerpts, without fee or royalty is hereby granted provided that the
>>   licensee:
>> 
>> I think this fails DFSG#3 which requires that you can create derivative
>> works.
>
> In practice, this may not be too difficult to work around.  You can
> just omit something non-essential like the table of contents or
> formatting.  It is needlessly annoying, though.
>
>> Further, this part:
>> 
>>    The target content must not create a derivative specification.
>> 
>> It appears to fail DFSG#6 which requires that the license do not
>> discriminate against some fields of endeavor.
>
> Agreed.  This is more serious.  People are not allowed to build upon an
> existing spec to improve and extend it, such as going from rfc 822 to
> 2822.  As long as w3c wants to only allow itself to make new and
> competing specifications, there is going to be a problem.

Yes and no, for the nuances I defer more to Ian and Rigo who can
probably clarify better than I.  It is very common for one Spec to
have elements it draws on from specifications developed elsewhere as
one will see in references section [5].  XHTML and other markups
(defined at W3C and elsewhere) certainly extend XML, draw on IETF,
POSIX and other W3C standards.

[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/html/#refs

-- 
Ted Guild <ted@w3.org>
W3C Systems Team
http://www.w3.org

Received on Friday, 6 March 2009 18:57:46 UTC