- From: Kirill Gavrylyuk <kirillg@microsoft.com>
- Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 19:51:25 -0800
- To: "Joseph Reagle" <reagle@w3.org>, <www-qa-wg@w3.org>, "Lofton Henderson" <lofton@rockynet.com>
Sure. I'd probably reiterate couple more points that we touched on during the meeting. I think it was pretty interesting discussion. Again, I love disclaimers as everyone else:) - this is all to the extent of my understanding of the Microsoft position on the licenses policy. Best way to hear the official position would be to contact AC rep or Microsoft legal department. 1. Test Cases, Test Documentation, Test Software. I like the option suggested by Joseph of using different licenses to different parts of a test suite: test cases, test documentation, test software. 1. Warranties and Liabilities. The W3C Software License provides no warranties against the materials (software) containing viral code, or infringing someone's patent or copyright rights, etc. When allowing its employees to use the software published under such license, a company may end up redistributing these viral or infringing materials. This will cause damage to its customers and therefore the company itself. This makes it hard to asses the risks of allowing the use of the materials published under such license. Why then to contribute to something that you cannot allow your employees to use? This concerns mostly software. I don't see it as a concern for the test cases or test documentation. 2. Scope of use. I think we went pretty light on this today, but I believe this is one of the key reasons why Microsoft would not like to make contributions to the materials published under the W3C Software License. We are happy to donate test cases for free to be used for the purpose they were created. Hence the desire to control the scope of use. Why would we donate them for free to be used for anything else but testing? Document License provides us a limited scope ("fair use") for the test cases which is close. That's why we were happy donating a large number of test cases for Schema and SOAP to be published under the Document License so far. 3. Redistribution. This was mentioned mostly to mitigate the risk expressed in 1. Therefore I am not that concerned about redistribution of the test cases/documentation, but only test software. I also believe the test software is intended for internal use only and not for redistribution (that's the way we would use it), but I understand that other companies are already redistributing the W3C software. 4. Modification/derivation work. Patrick brought up interesting scenarios of redistributing/incorporating the W3C test cases into a proprietary bigger test suite. Thinking on it a bit during lunch, I would call a fair use of a W3C test case collection the following: 4a. Addition. Add company's own test cases - clearly separate the W3C test suite and company's test cases. You can add a W3C test collection only as a whole, cannot exclude any of the test cases from it. (I wasn't sure about that during the telconf, but convinced now) 4b. Mark errors. Annotate test cases that they believe are in error in a separate document. Do not exclude those test cases. Do not edit them/change their context. 4c. Adding more metadata to existing test cases. If needed, add additionally a metadata for the test cases, by placing a separate copy into a separate folder (or building it dynamically on the fly). For example, in case of XML Schema test collection, if one needs to add more attributes then provided by the control file, one could supply a control file with those attributes that he/she wants to add and produce a cumulative one via simple transform/document function. This is of course more robust then to modify the original. 4d. Providing/changing binding for the test harness. If harness would require a change in the metadata, produce/supply the needed metadata in a separate file. Provide the original copy. And I agree with Joseph that this could be expressed in the FAQ to the Document License should it be used. > -----Original Message----- > From: Joseph Reagle [mailto:reagle@w3.org] > Sent: Monday, February 24, 2003 1:49 PM > To: www-qa-wg@w3.org; Lofton Henderson > Cc: Kirill Gavrylyuk > Subject: Re: DRAFT minutes, QA Working Group Teleconference 2003-02-24 > > > After reviewing the draft minutes, I started a summary [1] (providing at > least the goals/history/question) and was going to try to take a tenative > stab at framing a tenative position on the issues to elicit agreement or > disagreement but got caught on the liability/warranty issue. Since the > interesting questions, scope of use (at least in part) and redistubution > (in whole), hang off Kirill's concern there, perhaps he could say more on > that note? > 1. Warranty and Liabiltiy: While not particularly verbose the > disclaimers found in the W3C Software and Document Licenses do > have the approriate/relevant disclaimers. > Caveat: Kirill Gavrylyuk (Microsoft) stated that he has a concern > that since these licenses do not provide indemnities, and it's not > reasonable to expect W3C to do so, he is concerned about possible > misuse by or threat to customers. Joseph Reagle (W3C) responded > that the disclaimers are present and it's an organization's choice > whether they want to distribute the tests (under the W3C license). > > > [1] http://www.w3.org/2003/02/test-suite-copyright.html > [member link, should it be public?] >
Received on Monday, 24 February 2003 22:52:07 UTC