Re: Re: Question about GPL and DFSG Compatibility of a Proposed Amendment to the W3C Document Licence

[Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>]

> On Thu, 28 Apr 2011 at 13:27:48 +0200, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> > This would seem to imply a field of use restriction
> > against anything that is not covered by those 3 exceptions.  In
> > particular, this does not explicitly permit others to fork the
> > specification.
>
> It seems from the linked pages that one goal of the W3C's current non-Free
> document licensing is to prevent third parties from forking (say) the CSS3
> spec, making random changes (potentially incompatible ones), and publishing
> the result (as "FooCorp CSS 4", perhaps)...
> ...
> It seems particularly perverse to take legal measures to prevent forking when
> a reimplemented description of HTML5 is available under a much more
> permissive license from WHATWG...

Indeed. These and many other arguments have been raised against the 
W3C's futile resistance to spec forking.  See for instance, Mozilla's 
proposal to use MIT that provides some such rationale.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Apr/0696.html

But in the interest of not rehashing all of those arguments again here, 
it's probably best to focus on the narrower question of GPL compatibility.

--
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/