Re: DOM, Promises, and licensing

Hi Chris,

thanks for your level-headed and helpful analysis.

On 12/07/2013 22:50 , Chris Wilson wrote:
> The Document License, on the other hand, can only seek to protect itself
> from derivative works being made from the cloth of the document in
> question: so, if Anne were to take a W3C spec that is under the document
> license and replicate it, of course that would be prohibited.  However,
> were he to make contributions to a spec under the Document License AND
> to a non-W3C spec (or even a W3C spec not under such a license), I don't
> believe the DL by itself can prohibit such contributions.

That is my reading as well. I believe that it does leave one issue open 
however: if a contribution comes in on the "W3C side" (in itself a 
rather ill-defined idea, but let's say on a W3C mailing list or during a 
meeting), under what rules does it fall? Is Anne (or whoever) allowed to 
integrate it first into a non-W3C document?

In practice I don't believe that it's a huge problem, but it does 
maintain just the sort of uncertainty that can be a source of worry. 
That's reinforced by the fact that some prominent W3C members remain 
strongly opposed to forking licenses (IMHO very much against their best 
interests, but that's another topic).

> In short - I think the Invited Expert Agreement should be revised, but I
> believe Anne should not be afraid of running afoul of the IEA in this
> case, since he's not agreeing to it (as an employee of a Member);

Much agreed.

> At any rate, of course, the statement "...I personally would not want to
> edit anything that cannot be forked" would likely keep Anne from wanting
> to contribute to the W3C DOM spec anyway, at this point, so I suspect
> this may be academic.

I don't think that it is, because it points at a potential solution. A 
healthy web requires standards that are produced efficiently, by 
qualified people, in a royalty-free manner. If that requires some form 
of WHATWG-W3C cooperation — and it is clear that it does — then we are 
behooved to make it happen. Given the HTML WG licensing experiment 
becomes a reality, we will have a way forward. Imperfect for sure, but 
pointing in the right direction.

So to bring this all back on topic for this list, maybe the TAG should 
issue a short position statement indicating how open licensing is core 
to the web's values and essential to its continued development.

You never know, it might win over the last of the irredentist.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Monday, 15 July 2013 11:04:19 UTC