Le 25/11/2012 20:07, Kyle Huey a écrit :
Have you read Adam Barth's contributions to this discussion?
Sure, and I personally mostly agree with these points.
He has summarized the point well, I think. There is a difference
between what the license legally obligates one to do
I talked very briefly in terms of "legally" and spent more time talking
about "author intent" on purpose.
As I said, licences have a legal part to them, but also (and mostly?)
convey an intent. Actually, Anne made extremely clear what he meant in a
recent post [1]:
"Most of the WHATWG documents are published in the public domain (CC0
for countries that do not recognize the public domain). I think this is
important because these are documents that define part of the
architecture of the web. Nobody and no organization should be entitled
to them."
The intent is clear: the WHATWG publishes documents in the public domain
for very good reason. Anyone (W3C included!) can reuse them under close
to no condition, not even credit.
and what professionals working in good faith towards similar goals do.
Now, after discussing the author intention, we can discuss "what
professionals working in good faith do", but we're starting to get in a
blurry field where people from different cultures will have very
different definitions of what "professional", "work" and "good faith" mean.
Adam Barth has his definition (which I agree with, by the way). It
appears from the latest messages on this thread that the W3C agrees with
his definition so everything is fine.
In case the W3C didn't agree (which it was initially accused of), maybe
adding the WHATWG definition of "what professionals working in good
faith do" to its licence (as a show of intention, the legal part would
just be a side effect) could clear up cross-cultural ambiguities and
remove a good share of conflicts.
Once again, publishing work under public domain and expecting others to
respect mystical things like "what professionals working in good faith
do" is hypocritical. If you expect someone else to behave is some way,
the first step is expressing your expectations (the licence being one
clear way to do so), not expecting others to guess! Especially not on
the web where people from so many different cultures meet!
Clearly communicating intent and expectations is something I'd expect
from professionals working in good faith. I'm glad it happened in this
thread, I'm sad it took conflicts and tensions.
David
Ps : The importance of the intention behind a licence (besides the
purely legal aspect) can be seen elsewhere as the example of the AGPL
Licence and the Neo4J interpretation shows:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6500925/agpl-license-question-re-neo4j
[1] http://annevankesteren.nl/2012/11/copyright