No subject

" No right to create modifications or derivatives of W3C documents is
granted pursuant to this license. However, if additional requirements
(documented in the Copyright FAQ) are satisfied, the right to create
modifications or derivatives is sometimes granted by the W3C to individuals
complying with those requirements."

IETF RFC's are even less useful - they simply say "All Rights Reserved". 

	So in short, I think we're actually enabling more openness by
explicitly allowing, *without any affirmative action on the part of the
original authors* the preparation of derivative works within the umbrella of
the OpenID community. 

	-Gabe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: general-bounces at openid.net [mailto:general-bounces at openid.net] On
> Behalf Of Simon Josefsson
> Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 1:48 AM
> To: david at sixapart.com
> Cc: legal at openid.net; general at openid.net
> Subject: Re: [OpenID] [legal] Draft OpenID Intellectual Property
> RightsPolicy for Review
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Thanks for publishing this document, I understand that there is quite an
> effort behind it.
> 
> I have a concern about the copyright license you chose.  The original
> intention, which is in the rationale document, says:
> 
>     Brad Fitzpatrick, the father of OpenID, said that nobody should own
>     this. And the OpenID Foundation website states that "[n]obody's
>     planning on making any money from this" and "[t]he goal is to
>     release every part of this under the most liberal licenses
>     possible." The goal of the OpenID Intellectual Property Rights
>     Policy is to make Brad Fitzpatrick's statement, and the statement
>     of the OpenID Foundation, a reality.
> 
> That is a worthy goal that I agree with it fully.
> 
> However, the proposed copyright license for the documents is quite
> restrictive, and does not seem to be in spirit with the above.  Quoting
> the IPR policy document:
> 
>     Copyright License. Some Contributions may not be subject to
>     copyright. To the extent, however, that a Contribution is or may be
>     subject to copyright, the Contributor hereby grants a perpetual,
>     irrevocable (except in case of breach of this license),
>     non-exclusive, royalty- free, worldwide license in such copyright to
>     OpenID, to other Contributors, and to Implementers, to reproduce,
>     prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display the
>     Contribution and derivative works thereof solely for purposes of
>     developing draft OpenID Specifications and implementing OpenID
>     Implementers Drafts and OpenID Final Specifications.
> 
> This does not seem very liberal to me, the scope is narrowed for
> producing OpenID-related works ("solely for purposes of developing...").
> I believe that would fail many tests of compatibility with a free
> license such as the GPL.
> 
> I don't think the license would meet the criteria of the Debian Free
> Software Guidelines: <http://www.debian.org/social_contract>.  The
> restriction of scope fail to meet there criteria #6.
> 
> If you want to follow the "the goal is to release every part of this
> under the most liberal license possible" idea, I believe it is better to
> chose a well-known and well-studied copyright copyright license.
> 
> The X11 license is very liberal, the BSD license is very well-studied.
> You could chose to triple-license works under the X11/BSD/GPL.  The
> Creative Common licenses is popular for text works.
> 
> What do others think?
> 
> Thanks for your consideration,
> Simon
> 
> David Recordon <drecordon at sixapart.com> writes:
> 
> > Since the early summer we've been working to define an intellectual
> > property rights policy and process for technical OpenID specification
> > work moving forward.  The goal of this work is to truly allow the
> > community to continue to live up to Brad Fitzpatrick's original
> > "nobody should own this" statement.  As the community has grown this
> > year to include participation of larger companies, the desire to make
> > this statement a reality from a legal perspective has been quite
> > strong.  To achieve this, a group of representatives from the OpenID
> > Foundation, AOL, Microsoft, VeriSign, Sun, Symantec, and Yahoo!
> > worked to help draft and review a policy and related documents basing
> > the work upon similar policies from the IETF, OASIS, W3C, and Liberty
> > Alliance.  Today we're asking for review of this work for thirty days
> > so that before the end of the year we as a community can adopt the
> > policy and release the OpenID Authentication 2.0 specification final
> > version under it.
> >
> > As to the question of "What does this mean to me", there are a few
> > answers:
> >   - If you are using/implementing OpenID there is nothing that you
> > need to do to be protected by this policy.  All future work will be
> > covered by it and the policy includes provisions to retroactively
> > apply the non-assertion covenant to OpenID Authentication 1.1, OpenID
> > Simple Registration 1.0, and Yadis 1.0.
> >   - If you have actively contributed to one of the OpenID
> > specifications (especially if you have written text for 2.0) we will
> > be contacting you proactively over the next month for feedback on the
> > policy and asking you to agree to it.  This will thus allow us as a
> > community to release the 2.0 specification this year under the policy.
> >   - Once the policy is adopted, specification work will be broken up
> > into "working groups" based upon a topic.  For example Authentication
> > and Attribute Exchange will most likely become two working groups
> > with each group having its own specs-<foo>@openid.net mailing list.
> > This is to allow for IPR promises from the larger companies which may
> > not wish to participate in every OpenID community effort.  Before
> > posting to one of these working group lists for the first time, you
> > will be required to agree to the policy.  This will ensure that all
> > formal contributions to the final specifications are covered by the
> > policy and the resulting spec does not have any known IPR encumbrances.
> >
> > As part of this effort, we've also drafted a rationale document to
> > help explain some of the "design decisions" the group made.
> > Generally I recommend you read that document (it is free from
> > legalese) and it can be found at http://openid.net/ipr/
> > OpenID_IPR_Rationale-Circulation_Draft_20070925.pdf.  The policy and
> > process documents themselves can be found at http://openid.net/ipr/.
> > (I apologize for the PDFs, we'll get these up in HTML format before
> > they're final).  If you didn't see your question answered in this
> > email, please do look at the rationale document as it hopefully will
> > already be answered there.
> >
> > We've tried to keep the policy and process as simple as possible
> > while still giving the needed legal protections and are looking for
> > feedback around the process.  One thing to keep in mind is that the
> > process is based on consensus (much like the IETF or ASF) and many of
> > the clauses only apply in the case that consensus is impossible to
> > reach (which is viewed as being quite rare).  There is also still
> > some word-smithing which is needed, so anyplace it seems like we
> > meant to say the "OpenID Foundation" instead of "OpenID", we probably
> > meant to. :)
> >
> > We realize this is a lot to process, but have tried our best to
> > represent the views of a wide range of companies with varying IPR
> > positions as well as the values of this community.  We're certainly
> > interested in feedback and questions, ideally within the next thirty
> > days sent to legal at openid.net.  Differing from many discussions, even
> > if all you have to say is "+1" that is valuable feedback so that we
> > can know if we're on the right track.  Please also feel free to
> > contact me off-list if there are any questions or concerns you have
> > that you don't wish to discuss publicly though we certainly encourage
> > this discussion to happen on the list.
> >
> > Thanks again to everyone who has been involved in this work!
> >
> > --David
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > legal at openid.net
> > http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/legal
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