Re: QAH review: licensing and branding

QAWG --

Thanks for your review, Dom.

I want to raise one issue now, and maybe it can be on Monday telecon.

The following referenced materials are a good read, for background.  These 
were the result of a *lot* of work by W3C Legal (Joseph Reagle), and by our 
QAWG members (esp. Sun and Microsoft).

At 11:38 AM 6/30/2004 +0200, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux wrote:
>As per my F2F AI, here is my review of section 4 of the latest QAH
>http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-qa-handbook-20040510/#IANAL

This history, proceedings of 2003 ad-hoc task group, and conclusions are 
referenced from there...

[1] http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/qawg-issues-html#x49
[2] http://www.w3.org/2003/02/test-suite-copyright.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2003/06/11-test-copyright.html

Dom writes, about the publication license issue:

>[...]"As soon as the nature of the Working Group's test materials becomes
>clear, get consensus and define license terms for publication of the
>test materials."
>The current idea inside W3C is that the document license should be the
>default for the test cases themselves;

Without arguing here about the merits of that statement,

a.) I note that this is where we started 2 years ago (with the "test cases" 
refinement added now), and that didn't seem to be satisfactory to several 
of our big members;

b.) The  "use doc license" generalization comes without any supporting 
material to indicate how and why that conclusion was reached, except for this:

[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa-wg/2004Jun/0046.html ,

which is pretty thin in rationale and low in detail.

c.) Which leaves one curious, why should we toss all of the above 
referenced work, which tries to look at the subtleties and variations on 
the publication license issue?

>I'm not sure how we should word
>that,

Current wording leans towards Doc License (but not isolated for test 
cases):   "Document License has two characteristics that are attractive for 
test materials ... On the other hand, there are situations in which the 
Document License is inappropriate,..."  It could be strengthened back to 
its former spirit I guess.

>but I think it would be worth putting up the Document license as
>the thing to do, and warn that using any other type of license may take
>a long time to get agreement, and should be considered all the more
>early.

Except for the "warn", this is not all that far from the spirit of the 
current text.  Current text mildly leans toward Doc License.  I'm not sure 
what is implied in your phrasing "the thing to do".  (Does that mean, be 
ready to face the Inquisition if you don't use Doc License?)

>(note that what I'm saying only apply to test cases as far as I
>understand, which means that our note with regard to different licenses
>for different parts of the test suite still makes sense)

Summarizing... It seems to me that we have almost come full circle.  We 
started by strongly recommending the Doc. License in OpsGL.  That led to a 
lot of objection, which led to the 2003 task group, which led to ... 2004: 
recommend the Doc License.  What's different now?  Why should we not expect 
the same criticism of the Doc License recommendation as before, and how 
would we answer (where is the rationale and process behind "the current 
idea in W3C")?  Is the focus on test cases sufficient to make everyone 
happy now?

-Lofton.

Received on Tuesday, 6 July 2004 17:24:08 UTC