Facts that don't appear to be in active dispute:
There were talks in 2012 that broke down[1]. What was discussed is in
dispute[2]. I was not a party to those meetings.
As of 2014, the W3C Advisory committee is interested in having the URL
Specification developed in the WebApps Working group in conjunction with
the WHATWG[3].
CC-BY and the W3C document license are incompatible with CC0, GPL[4],
and the Mozilla Public License[5]. The WHATWG is unlikely to adopt that
combination of licenses for these reasons.
The W3C Member Agreement[6] talks about "execut[ing] such assignment
documents as may be required". I'm not aware of any such assignments
being executed. The work I have been doing on the URL Specification is
relatively new, and unlikely to be covered by any such in any case. The
Member Agreement later goes on to talk about joint ownership without an
"obligation of accounting".
The Invited Expert[7] agreement specifically calls out «Branching» as
one example of a non-permissible derivative work.
Both Anne and myself were and remain employees of W3C Member companies
during the periods that the WHATWG URL Specification has been actively
developed.
---
Hypothetical scenario #1: I work on my own, and develop a URL
specification from scratch. I make it available using CC0 on
intertwingly.net and then on github.com/rubys, and do nothing to
discourage others to build derivatives of this work under the license
terms of their choosing. While I have the ability to place this work
myself into WHATWG and W3C repositories, in this hypothetical scenario I
take no such action myself. I believe that in this scenario, both the
W3C and WHATWG could independently chose to take this action on their
own. Anne seems to have come to the conclusion that "the moment a
non-W3C document enters W3C space, it can no longer be developed outside
the W3C"[8]. I see nothing that supports that conclusion.
Actual proposal #2: I've described in some detail[9] how a W3C Working
Group could chose to "shepherd" a document produced elsewhere, citing
the WHATWG as an example of this, and proposing that the WHATWG URL
Standard be the first test of this proposal. Initial read[10] is that
such a proposal would require no change to the W3C Process. I am not
aware of any actual legal agreement that would prohibit such. My
manager, my AC representative, the W3C CEO are specifically aware of my
work in this area. Furthermore this email, and my work in general, is
public.
Alternate proposal #3: Michael Champion (and presumably others) would
prefer[11] a common repository with stabilizing branches, and for those
stabilizing branches to be licensed under different terms than the
master[3]. For this to work, I believe that the W3C would need to
publicly clarify how this would work in the context of existing legal
agreements[6][7].
- Sam Ruby
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2014Nov/0029.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2014Nov/0036.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Nov/0157.html
[4] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
[5] https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/license-policy.html
[6] http://www.w3.org/2009/12/Member-Agreement#ipr
[7] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2007/06-invited-expert#L118
[8] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2014Nov/0034.html
[9] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2014/11/20/WHATWG-W3C-Collaboration
[10] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Nov/0148.html
