[License-discuss] Request for feedback: public specification licensing

[Roland Turner]

On 16/7/24 11:35, Giacomo Catenazzi wrote:
> On 12.07.2024 03:56, Richard Fontana wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 9, 2024 at 8:29 AM Nathan Willis via License-discuss
> > <license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> And those factors would need to interact predictably with a specification document that is free to read, implement, and share ... but the specification should not be forked or modified (since that would defeat the purpose: interoperability).
> > 
> > This is the key problem with your license in my opinion. It replicates
> > a traditional assumption in the standards community that copyright
> > should be used to prevent people from modifying specifications. I
> > think this was rooted in a bygone era not around interoperability
> > objectives but rather business models in which certain prominent
> > standards organizations used the sale of  copies of standards
> > documents as a revenue stream (perhaps some of them still attempt to
> > do this).

This is not correct.

IETF in particular has never charged for access to its standards, but 
for at least 15 years has felt the need to put a license in place 
requiring that — outside of IETF processes — only unchanged copies can 
be distributed, or copies translated to other languages that preserve 
the meaning as closely as possible.

It's not a revenue question. The important issue is that all copies of 
an interoperability standard must say the same thing, or 
interoperability itself is defeated.


> I second that for practical reasons. Sometime standards stale, and
> nobody is anymore responsible for it. WG dissolves. It happens a lot.
>
> Also I would like to have a WHATWG / HTML5 path: having freedom to fork
> and continue, and ev. get it back.
>
> So I would like more as TeX license: modifications requires change of
> name (and possibly to make clear what it is modified and/or there is
> modification.

Yes. Permitting forks, but requiring both the use of a separate name and 
clear attribution are within reason for open source licenses. (I've not 
surveyed the existing approved licenses for examples.)

- Roland