Re: W3C Excerpt and Citation license

[Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu>]

Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> wrote:
> Ted Guild <ted@w3.org> writes:
> 
> > W3C is creating an excerpt license (current draft online [1]) and
> > hoping to get public review and feedback, including particularly from
> > the Open Source community.
> 
> The complete license is reproduced below, for easy review on
> debian-legal.
> 
> One problematic part seem to be (my emphasis):
> 
>   Permission to copy, to use, to create derivatives of parts of the work
>   (but not the entire work), or to create extended citations or
>   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>   excerpts, without fee or royalty is hereby granted provided that the
>   licensee:
> 
> I think this fails DFSG#3 which requires that you can create derivative
> works.

In practice, this may not be too difficult to work around.  You can
just omit something non-essential like the table of contents or
formatting.  It is needlessly annoying, though.

> Further, this part:
> 
>    The target content must not create a derivative specification.
> 
> It appears to fail DFSG#6 which requires that the license do not
> discriminate against some fields of endeavor.

Agreed.  This is more serious.  People are not allowed to build upon an
existing spec to improve and extend it, such as going from rfc 822 to
2822.  As long as w3c wants to only allow itself to make new and
competing specifications, there is going to be a problem.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@caltech.edu