Re: DOM, Promises, and licensing

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:04 AM, Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org> wrote:

> 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?
>

An excellent point, and Alex and I were just having a conversation on this
point.  In short, if you're referring to copyright, it probably doesn't
matter if the contribution is an ill-defined idea;  in either case, you're
going to write up the solution in non-derivative wording.

If the contribution is, for example, well-defined wording - well then no, I
wouldn't think Anne (or whoever) could integrate that into a non-W3C
document (without rewording/restructuring).

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).


I see most of the uncertainty there are relating to patent issues, more so
than copyright. But the quasi-openness of the W3C processes across groups
(e.g. the use of public non-member/invited-expert lists that may generate
contributions) today cause some of these problems, too.

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.
>

Of course.  If the HTML WG licensing experiment becomes reality, that would
perhaps solve this; and I expect I overstated this anyway.


> 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.


Well, if that helped move us to open licensing more quickly, sure.  :)

 -C