[whatwg] WHATWG specification license update

[Ian Hickson]

In the interests of transparency, a quick heads-up: some Apple, Opera, 
Mozilla, and Google employees met at the end of March to discuss the W3C's 
recent announcement about the HTML specification copyright license:

  http://www.w3.org/QA/2010/03/update_on_html_5_document_lice.html

The attendees first discussed the role of the WHATWG in the Web standards
community, relative to the W3C, the IETF, and other groups. It was
concluded that the WHATWG still served a valuable role. Aspects of the
WHATWG that were raised as relevant here were that it provides a
light-weight process for experimentation (with some similarities with W3C
incubator groups), that it provides a version of the specification under a
liberal license compatible with the MPL, GPL, and LGPL licenses, and that
it provides an established "escape hatch" in the hopefully unlikely event
of a failure in the W3C's HTML working group.

The discussion then turned to whether to revise the copyright notice 
and/or document license, while respecting the goals of the organisation. 
No decisions were made on any of these topics other than the decision to 
further examine these topics in the near future.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'