On Thu, 28 Apr 2011 at 13:27:48 +0200, Lachlan Hunt wrote: > This would seem to imply a field of use restriction > against anything that is not covered by those 3 exceptions. In > particular, this does not explicitly permit others to fork the > specification.
It seems from the linked pages that one goal of the W3C's current non-Free document licensing is to prevent third parties from forking (say) the CSS3 spec, making random changes (potentially incompatible ones), and publishing the result (as "FooCorp CSS 4", perhaps). RFCs have a similar policy and it presents similar problems <http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/> (although recent RFCs use a BSD-style license for code fragemnts, avoiding some of the bad effects of BCP78). I can see why the W3C needs to discourage forks of its standards, and in particular, avoid misrepresentation of modified versions as the original or W3C-approved version, but I don't think copyright is necessarily the right way to achieve this: making it illegal to distribute modified versions seems a much "bigger hammer" than is necessary. Holding and enforcing a trademark on the W3C name (as W3C indeed does) seems a more appropriate mechanism? There's nothing to stop a vendor embracing-and-extending a W3C standard without making verbatim copies of any of the W3C's spec wording (e.g. each major browser supports a HTML-like markup language consisting of a W3C-HTML subset plus browser extensions), so it's not clear to me that using copyright like this is particularly effective either. It seems particularly perverse to take legal measures to prevent forking when a reimplemented description of HTML5 is available under a much more permissive license from WHATWG... S -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110428154810.ga10...@reptile.pseudorandom.co.uk