- From: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
- Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 10:13:58 -0500
- To: Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org>, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>
- CC: Arthur Barstow <art.barstow@gmail.com>, www-archive <www-archive@w3.org>, "lehors@us.ibm.com >> Arnaud Le Hors/Cupertino/IBM" <lehors@us.ibm.com>, Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org>
On 11/23/2014 09:51 AM, Jeff Jaffe wrote: > [adding PLH] > > There may be several different issues that we should all try to clarify. > > 1. Byte-for-byte copies. Sam's proposal envisions the use of > byte-for-byte copies. But he also states that these copies must meet > the needs of W3C pubrules. These might be in contradiction; I'll > explain the contradiction and I'll explain how I interpreted Sam'e > proposal. > > The contradiction is in the document license. WHATWG publishes with > CC-0 and OWFa, and W3C publishes with the W3C Document license and > occasionally CC-BY. How can it possibly be a byte-for-byte copy if some > of the bytes (document license) are different? > > My interpretation of Sam's proposal was that he meant that the documents > would be byte-for-byte copies with the exception of the document > license. Sam, is that a correct interpretation? My original suggestion was byte-for-byte with the exception of links (e.g., stylesheet) and references. I also invited everybody to suggest revisions or alternate proposals. > 2. Contributions. W3C requires that contributions come from > participants of the Working Group so that we are on strong ground in > declaring RF. If there is text that is proposed from outside the WG, it > is a responsibility of the Chair to make sure that we are not bringing > in text that is encumbered by patents. > > In this proposal, I am assuming that the Chairs would need to fulfill > that responsibility even for text coming in from the WHATWG. > > In the case of URL, with most/all of the text coming from Sam and Anne - > both of whose companies are part of WebApps - this does not appear to be > a large burden. I agree that this isn't likely a problem. > 3. Source of original document. There are some documents that are > currently under restrictive licenses such as the W3C Document License. > The W3C community (specifically the Member organizations - the AC and > AB) has not approved forkable licenses (with the exception of the > limited CC-BY experiment). This might be what Anne is referring to. If > you take some existing W3C document (e.g. TTML) which is only published > under the W3C document license and use that as the source of a revision, > Anne is correct that it is not trivial to make that available under a > permissive license. > > To the best of my knowledge that is not an issue for URL because my > understanding is that we are talking about a document that is not > encumbered by a previous copyright restriction (to be sure I have not > asked for a legal review). > > I think Anne is correct that it would be difficult to implement Sam's > proposal for an existing document such as TTML. From a legal point of > view, W3C owns the copyright and has legal authority to make it > available under a different license. However, I doubt that W3C would > feel comfortable doing that without the agreement of the AC/AB - and I > would not be optimistic. I don't think this is a problem. > 4. Ongoing modifications. Here is another potential issue. Let's say > that a major revision of the spec is done in W3C, and W3C publishes a > new draft under a restrictive document license. The next day, WHATWG > wants to publish a copy. > > While arguably that could be a violation of W3C's Document license, I > don't think it arises in Sam's proposal. As I understand it, all > modifications happen first in the WHATWG (with its permissive license) > and are then copied into W3C. So there is already a permissive license > associated with any version of the document prior to its coming under > restrictions of the W3C document license. I don't think this is a problem. What appears indeed to be a problem is the text in section 7b of the Member Agreement, and section 2.2 of the Invited Expert and Collaborator Agreement. I've asked about this on the public-w3process list: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Nov/0156.html > Jeff - Sam Ruby > On 11/23/2014 7:12 AM, Sam Ruby wrote: >> cc += Jeff, Arnaud >> >> On 11/23/2014 04:05 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote: >>> On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net> >>> wrote: >>>> Would it be possible to fork https://github.com/whatwg/url into >>>> https://github.com/w3c/, and to give me the necessary access to >>>> update this? >>> >>> I'm not sure why this escaped me, but the reason this doesn't work, >>> provided you want to continue to contribute to the WHATWG, is that the >>> W3C prevents it. I was after this kind of setup in 2012, and Jeff and >>> Wendy told me in no uncertain terms that it was in violation of the >>> Member Agreement. I then became a non-Member, but the Invited Expert >>> and Collaborator Agreement prevents the same thing. >>> >>> So if we are to go through with this, I would need to something in >>> writing from the W3C and IBM (the actual Member Agreements are private >>> and may have differences per company as I understand it) that this is >>> in fact okay. >> >> I believe that there must have been a miscommunication; especially >> given that Jeff has indicated[1][2] that he doesn't see any changes to >> the W3C process required to implement what I plan to do[3]. >> >> Just to be clear, I've been doing my work on my own machine. Nobody >> seems to have a problem with that. I push it to my site >> (intertwingly.net under CC0). Nobody has a problem with that. I push >> it to github under my name. Nobody has a problem with that. >> >> The W3C is willing to consider the contribution. The W3C has >> different ideas on licensing which I'm not thrilled with, but can live >> with. >> >> Michael Champion has proposed that we establish a separate >> repository[4] for shared work. Nobody has a problem with that. >> >> Hopefully this miscommunication can be resolved before my rewriting of >> the parser work[5] is complete. >> >> - Sam Ruby >> >> [1] >> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Nov/0148.html >> [2] >> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Nov/0155.html >> [3] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2014/11/20/WHATWG-W3C-Collaboration >> [4] >> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Nov/0149.html >> [5] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25946 >
Received on Sunday, 23 November 2014 15:15:07 UTC