On 2013-05-23 16:55, Dave Cridland wrote:
On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Peter Saint-Andre <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 5/23/13 1:55 AM, Dave Cridland wrote: > The timing's now reached the perfect level of irony, I think. It's not clear to me that the XSF can legitimately publish other people's extensions, or that third parties can submit other people's extensions. I'm all for documentation, but we might not be able to do that in the XEP series. It's not clear to me why not. We certainly couldn't if this were lifting text from someone else's documentation - it's not - it's merely documenting an XMPP extension, and as far as I'm aware there is no restriction on our doing so - it's purely a copyright issue.
Two reasons I can come up with are copyright and patents on the protocol itself. I'm not sure in which jurisdictions copyright is applicable and/or enforcible to protocol, but at least the US and the EU seem to have provisions for this particular case [1]. Patents, well, there might be dozens of patents covering our existing protocols. I don't want to know about those, if I can help it.
On top of that, our own ventures in this area, SIFT specifically, are functionally equivalent and/or overlapping.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality -- ralphm
