[whatwg] Change of copyright notice
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Mon Nov 8 15:49:39 PST 2004
It took a while, but we finally have all the lawyers happy (to the last
piece of punctuation) and the header of the WHATWG specs has been updated
to read:
(c) Copyright 2004 Apple Computer, Inc., Mozilla Foundation, and Opera
Software ASA.
You are granted a license to use, reproduce and create derivative works
of this document.
The change being that the specs are now joint-copyright between Apple,
Mozilla, and Opera, so that if any one organisation goes "dark side", the
spec isn't at risk. Since one of the three copyright holders is a
non-profit organisation with no shareholders, and since the other two
companies are competitors, it is unlikely that all three copyright holders
would ever all agree to changing this copyright notice unless it was in
the interests of the Web (in fact, given that it took over two months for
the three groups to agree to a six word change, I wouldn't really worry
about it ever changing again unless it is for the copyright to be assigned
to another standards organisation).
This should resolve the various concerns people have raised about the
copyright status of the specs. Specifically, we received feedback saying
that the specs should be copyrighted by more than one vendor, and feedback
saying that it should be copyright by at least one non-commercial entity.
Both of these conditions have now been met.
I shall now be resuming work responding to comments and editing the spec.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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