Well, it's been two days since this thread began, and I wanted to
echo back what I've heard from the discussion. [Fair warning, I've
been flying quite a bit, and will be for the next week, so I may fall
a bit out-of-date...]
As soon as I first edited the wiki page to describe this strategy,
Andy reached out to me to inquire how the public-domain release
interacted with the original 2004 copyright statement. I don't have
any firm ideas at this point; Tantek replied to this thread by taking
the admirable step of clarifying that as much as possible for all of
the pages that he could, individually removing the 2004 statement
from pages he'd edited.
However, as Ernie noted, the wiki medium arguably calls for tracking
the contributions of *all* the contributors who modify the pages,
above and beyond the stated "authors" of a page/spec. We're hardly
proposing any kind of automated checking at this point, but it's an
interesting direction for the future.
Andy's initial public reaction did take me aback, though: while he
may be correct the PD text currently states that "unless otherwise
stated" (because that's what was copied from Wikipedia), the intent
is different. Perhaps we should be discussing "unless otherwise
prohibited," for example.
More generally,though, I think volunteering in this case makes for
better game-theory than holding back until 'everyone else' commits to
a more open strategy first. Taking the incremental step of marking
your profile clearly states an individual's intent and also sets the
stage for finding out whether there *is* community consensus that the
public-domain approach is appropriate for microformats.org -- a first
among even remotely-standards-like efforts to my knowledge.
Migrating to a new, clearer copyright regime will not happen
overnight and must be done clearly and cleanly -- but it begins, I
submit, by offering to cooperate in the construction of a new regime.
Please consider joining in by adding the release to you user profiles
today...
Thanks,
Rohit Khare
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