licensing (was Re: Setting up a purl for rss/1.1

Reto Bachmann-Gmuer <[email protected]> writes:

> Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> 
> >Reto Bachmann-Gmuer <[email protected]> writes:
> >>- Is a NoDerivs-license usable for a community process?

> >The NoDerivs license covers only the prose of the Specification:
> >the format itself is not under any license, and can be freely used
> >by anyone. If someone wished to evolve the format further, they
> >would certainly be free to, as the Status section outlines.
> >
> >I certainly don't think this is a major blocker for evolution of
> >the format: RSS 1.1, for example, takes no prose from the RSS 1.0
> >specification, so I don't understand why further evolution would
> >need a more permissive license than the ND allows.
> >  

> Take my experiments on a backward compatible evolution, I've
> considered editing your document, I saw the license so I took the
> 1.0 spec. What's your motivation for "NoDerivs", "it doesn't seem to
> harm to much" doesn't convince me.

You are technically correct, but possibly misunderstanding intent.

All spec development organizations use "no derivation" licenses.  That
means that once a specification is generated, it must follow that
organization's policies for future development.  Any member may
produce a proposal or draft against that spec for presentation as a
successor, according to the organization's policies.

So the issue here is not the "no derivation" license, but the
ownership of the copyright.  It is correct to say that only Sean and
Christopher may update their proposal, as currently copyrighted and
licensed.

However, I don't think that that is their intent.

Several possibilities exist.  If the RSS-DEV WG chooses to adopt the
proposal (and so far I'm personally open to this), then the copyright
could be assigned to the group and follow the group's policies.
Possibly better in any case would be to have the spec hosted by the W3
as a Note as part of the Semantic Web Activity (I don't think
vocabularies should go the Rec route), assigning the copyright to the
W3.

  -- Ken


 
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