RE: DRAFT minutes, QA Working Group Teleconference 2003-02-24

Sure. I'd probably reiterate couple more points that we touched on
during the meeting. I think it was pretty interesting discussion.

Again, I love disclaimers as everyone else:) - this is all to the extent
of my understanding of the Microsoft position on the licenses policy.
Best way to hear the official position would be to contact AC rep or
Microsoft legal department.


1. Test Cases, Test Documentation, Test Software. I like the option
suggested by Joseph of using different licenses to different parts of a
test suite: test cases, test documentation, test software. 


1. Warranties and Liabilities.
The W3C Software License provides no warranties against the materials
(software) containing viral code, or infringing someone's patent or
copyright rights, etc. When allowing its employees to use the software
published under such license, a company may end up redistributing these
viral or infringing materials. This will cause damage to its customers
and therefore the company itself. This makes it hard to asses the risks
of allowing the use of the materials published under such license. Why
then to contribute to something that you cannot allow your employees to
use?

This concerns mostly software. I don't see it as a concern for the test
cases or test documentation. 


2. Scope of use. 
I think we went pretty light on this today, but I believe this is one of
the key reasons why Microsoft would not like to make contributions to
the materials published under the W3C Software License. We are happy to
donate test cases for free to be used for the purpose they were created.
Hence the desire to control the scope of use. Why would we donate them
for free to be used for anything else but testing? Document License
provides us a limited scope ("fair use") for the test cases which is
close. That's why we were happy donating a large number of test cases
for Schema and SOAP to be published under the Document License so far. 


3. Redistribution. This was mentioned mostly to mitigate the risk
expressed in 1. Therefore I am not that concerned about redistribution
of the test cases/documentation, but only test software. I also believe
the test software is intended for internal use only and not for
redistribution (that's the way we would use it), but I understand that
other companies are already redistributing the W3C software.


4. Modification/derivation work. Patrick brought up interesting
scenarios of redistributing/incorporating the W3C test cases into a
proprietary bigger test suite. Thinking on it a bit during lunch, I
would call a fair use of a W3C test case collection the following: 

4a. Addition. Add company's own test cases - clearly separate the W3C
test suite and company's test cases. You can add a W3C test collection
only as a whole, cannot exclude any of the test cases from it. (I wasn't
sure about that during the telconf, but convinced now)

4b. Mark errors. Annotate test cases that they believe are in error in a
separate document. Do not exclude those test cases. Do not edit
them/change their context.

4c. Adding more metadata to existing test cases. If needed, add
additionally a metadata for the test cases, by placing a separate copy
into a separate folder (or building it dynamically on the fly). For
example, in case of XML Schema test collection, if one needs to add more
attributes then provided by the control file, one could supply a control
file with those attributes that he/she wants to add and produce a
cumulative one via simple transform/document function. This is of course
more robust then to modify the original.

4d. Providing/changing binding for the test harness. If harness would
require a change in the metadata, produce/supply the needed metadata in
a separate file. Provide the original copy.

And I agree with Joseph that this could be expressed in the FAQ to the
Document License should it be used.




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Reagle [mailto:reagle@w3.org]
> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2003 1:49 PM
> To: www-qa-wg@w3.org; Lofton Henderson
> Cc: Kirill Gavrylyuk
> Subject: Re: DRAFT minutes, QA Working Group Teleconference 2003-02-24
> 
> 
> After reviewing the draft minutes, I started a summary [1] (providing
at
> least the goals/history/question) and was going to try to take a
tenative
> stab at framing a tenative position on the issues to elicit agreement
or
> disagreement but got caught on the liability/warranty issue. Since the
> interesting questions, scope of use (at least in part) and
redistubution
> (in whole), hang off Kirill's concern there, perhaps he could say more
on
> that note?
>     1. Warranty and Liabiltiy: While not particularly verbose the
>        disclaimers found in the W3C Software and Document Licenses do
>        have the approriate/relevant disclaimers.
>        Caveat: Kirill Gavrylyuk (Microsoft) stated that he has a
concern
>        that since these licenses do not provide indemnities, and it's
not
>        reasonable to expect W3C to do so, he is concerned about
possible
>        misuse by or threat to customers. Joseph Reagle (W3C) responded
>        that the disclaimers are present and it's an organization's
choice
>        whether they want to distribute the tests (under the W3C
license).
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2003/02/test-suite-copyright.html
> [member link, should it be public?]
>

Received on Monday, 24 February 2003 22:52:07 UTC