On May 22, 2007, at 4:38 AM, Dave Raggett wrote:
On Mon, 21 May 2007, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
And the standard W3C license for IDL files would likely make it
impossible to start with them. If we wanted to publish IDL that
implementors could use, we'd have to change the license.
Could you please expand on why such changes are needed?
The W3C's IDL license would not be usable for code that is part of
Mozilla or WebKit because it is incompatible with the LGPL (WebKit's
license and part of the Mozilla triple license).
Specifically, the following clauses:
"Permission to copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation, with or without modification, for any purpose and
without fee or royalty is hereby granted, provided that you include
the following on ALL copies of the software and documentation or
portions thereof, including modifications: ... Any pre-existing
intellectual property disclaimers, notices, or terms and conditions.
If none exist, the W3C® Short Software Notice should be included
(hypertext is preferred, text is permitted) within the body of any
redistributed or derivative code. ... Notice of any changes or
modifications to the files, including the date changes were made. (We
recommend you provide URIs to the location from which the code is
derived.)"
"Consequently, modified versions of the DOM bindings must document
that they do not conform to the W3C standard; in the case of the IDL
definitions, the pragma prefix can no longer be 'w3c.org'; in the case
of the Java language binding, the package names can no longer be in
the 'org.w3c' package."
Conflicts with clause 10 of the LGPL, which does not allow imposing
any additional restrictions beyond the LGPL requirements:
"Each time you redistribute the Library (or any work based on the
Library), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute, link with or modify the Library
subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties with
this License."
I'm not sure how it would work with proprietary software but I think
the requirement to describe all changes in all copies of documentation
is quite onerous.
Regards,
Maciej
