Status: This document has been prepared by the W3C staff for discussion by the Advisory Committee. Note: There are changes in this draft to the licenses that the HTML Working Group reviewed.
In 2009, participants of the HTML Working Group requested a new document license for HTML based on a number of use cases. This request led to extensive discussions within the W3C Membership, W3C Advisory Board, and Patents and Standards Interest Group (PSIG) about license changes. Based on feedback from the Membership, and because of the merits of the use cases, in March 2010, the W3C Director asked the PSIG to find a license that would 'satisfy all the use cases except for forking.'
Since then, the PSIG has sought to fulfill the Director's request. Over the last year, the PSIG has had discussions of how a license might be designed to enable as many of these use cases as possible, while not allowing outright forking of the specification. Information from that discussion, and, in particular, the text of and discussion of three candidate licenses is provided below.
In April, the HTML Working Group separately took a survey of these three licenses plus an additional two licenses that they wanted to comment on; you may review the results. See below for changes from the version that the HTML Working Group considered.
The W3C staff now seeks feedback from the Advisory Committee on which of the three licenses they believe best satisfies the Director's request.
To understand how the PSIG arrived at these licenses, it is useful to review the use cases (listed below) and the Director's request to the PSIG:
The Director asked the PSIG to solve both sets of requirements simultaneously: in essence, to find a solution that imposes a restriction (against the creation of derivative specifications) while allowing developers to use any downstream software license they choose (including, but not limited to, GPL). "GPL" is used here as convenient shorthand for "any open source software license that allows no additional usage restrictions." Because of the approaches taken, views differ on how and whether the licenses address various use cases. Therefore, additional materials (such as FAQ entries) are used to clarify the intent of the licenses.
Views differ on the GPL-compatibility of the proposed licenses. Anticipating that some are likely to turn to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for views on the GPL-compatibility of license, the PSIG consulted Eben Moglen. His input is reflected below, along with the differing views within the PSIG about the same licenses.
All of the candidate licenses are designed to allow liberal use of any code-like portions included in the specification; as a result, they allow more reuse than the current W3C Document License. In addition, because several of the use cases distinguish code-like portions from "prose," the licenses make similar distinctions:
W3C already makes it a practice to license IDL portions of a specification under the W3C Software License; policies of other organizations such as the IETF also distinguish code from prose.
The PSIG took two approaches to achieving GPL-compatibility:
Options 1 and 3 adopt two variations to the first approach:
With this as background, the three licenses can be summarized as follows:
In addition, note:
Note: The expectation is that the license could be adopted for any specification published by the HTML Working Group, or any specification split off from the original HTML5 draft. The complete list is: HTML 5; HTML+RDFa; HTML Microdata; HTML Canvas 2D Context; HTML: The Markup Language; HTML/XHTML Compatibility Authoring Guidelines; HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives; HTML5 differences from HTML4; HTML5 Web Messaging; Web Storage; The Web Sockets API, Server-Sent Events. W3C expects to gain experience with any new license before deploying it more broadly.
Views within the PSIG differ on how each license satisfies each use cases. The primary sources of disagreement relate to one's view of the following:
The table below says "No consensus" where there is clear disagreement on any of the above points.
| Use cases | Option 1 | Option 2 | Option 3 | Status quo (W3C Document License) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1, 10 | Full: Yes. Portions: Yes, in supporting materials accompanying software, and in documentation of software. | Full: Yes. Reasonable Portions: Yes. | Full: Yes. Portions: Yes, in supporting materials accompanying software, and in documentation of software. | Full: Yes. Portions: No. |
| 2, 3, 7 | No consensus | Yes. | General consensus that it is, but not unanimity. | No. |
| 4 | Code-like portions: Yes. Prose: No consensus. | Yes. | Code-like portions: Yes. Prose: General consensus that it is, but not unanimity. | No. |
| 5, 6 | Yes. | Yes. | Yes. | No. However, it is customary in W3C to publish IDL under the W3C Software License. |
| 8, 9 | No. | No consensus. | No consensus. | No. |
| 11 | Yes. | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
Copyright © 2011 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio).
W3C liability and trademark rules apply.
As a whole, this document may be used according to the terms of the W3C Document License. In addition:
The notice is:
"Copyright © 2011 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio). This software or document includes material copied from or derived from [title and URI of the W3C document]."
The PSIG intends this license to be compatible with open source software licenses, including GPL, LGPL, Apache, and MPL (all listed in the use cases). This license does not impose a limitation on the republication of all or part of the specification in software. The W3C makes no representations or warranties as to whether the license is in fact compatible with any particular open source software license.
Within the PSIG, there are differing views as to whether the phrase in the license "the publication of derivative works of this document for use as a technical specification is expressly prohibited" is a restriction that adversely affects these use cases.
Views suggesting that this license is not "GPL-compatible" include the following:
Views suggesting that this license is "GPL-compatible" include the following:
The PSIG has asked the following organizations to provide their views on compatibility with specific licenses:
The FSF and Mozilla representatives cited the restriction related to derivative specifications as the source of incompatibility.
Copyright © 2011 W3C ® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability and trademark rules apply. The W3C Document License applies to this document as a whole; however, to facilitate implementation of the technical specifications set forth in this document you may:
You may distribute, under any license, the portions used, copied, or modified in accordance with the terms set forth above.
Copying, republication, or distribution of any portion of this document must include the following notice:
"Copyright © 2011 W3C ® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio). Includes material copied from or derived from [title and URI of the W3C document]."
Option 2 permits a wide variety of uses of the text and code contained therein. It is not, however, intended to facilitate the publication of derivative works as a technical specification. Even if you believe that such an action might be permitted under some reading of the license terms, W3C strongly requests that, in the interests of industry convergence and clarity that you not republish any part of this document as a technical specification. W3C exists as a forum for building consensus around specifications, and seeks to create an environment where people remain at the table to work out their differences. "Forking" (as distinguished from experimentation with various proposals within a group) is discouraged as it tends to increases everyone's costs and creates confusion.
If you are working with the specification, it is better to refer to it than copy it. Please consider that other IPR commitments (e.g., for patents) that are associated with W3C Recommendations do not extend to your derivative specification; see the W3C Patent Policy for authoritative information. Finally, there are marks, names, and other properties (e.g. the name "W3C") that are not part of this specification; W3C does not license its marks for use in derivative works, and the license(s) for this specification do not apply to them.
W3C encourages experimentation based on W3C specifications, but asks that (1) the experiments be clearly identified as such, and (2) that they do not harm interoperability with other W3C specifications.
Eben Moglen has stated that he considers Option 2 to be GPL-compatible.
Copyright © 2011 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio).
W3C liability and trademark rules apply.
As a whole, this document may be used according to the terms of the W3C Document License. In addition:
The notice is:
"Copyright © 2011 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio). This software or document includes material copied from or derived from [title and URI of the W3C document]."
Option 3 is identical to Option 1 with the removal of the following sentence: "HOWEVER, the publication of derivative works of this document for use as a technical specification is expressly prohibited." As a result of this change, Eben Moglen has stated that Option 3 is compatible with all GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses. Others in the community see the lack of express permission as incompatible with the GPL.
As with all three licenses, Option 3 seeks to balance the requirement for complete freedom to write and distribute software embodying W3C specifications, with the agreed principle that forking of those specifications to create incompatible implementations should be resisted. Option 3 does not expressly forbid the creation of derivative specifications, NOR DOES IT AUTHORIZE SUCH ACTIVITIES. It is still W3C policy to discourage unauthorized forks of its specifications, and nobody should read Option 3 as including any such authorization.
These are the eleven HTML Working Group use cases, recorded here using a PSIG transcription. Note: In the use cases, "I" refers to Henri Sivonen, who submitted a real-world use case to the group.
This document is based on a previous versions of licenses that were put to the HTML Working Group in a survey; see the survey results.
Licenses 1 and 3 have been slightly changed in this draft. The previous text was:
Furthermore, all code, pseudo-code, schema, data tables, cascading style sheets, and interface definition language is licensed under the W3C Software License, LGPL 2.1, and MPL 1.1.
However, it was pointed out during the HTML comment period that MPL 1.1 has patent licensing implications, which makes inclusion of this license a bug. At no time did the PSIG intend to grant licenses to patents via a revised document license.
The primary goal of the provision in question is to make code portions of a specification unambiguously available under a GPL-compatible license. Given that the W3C Software License fulfills that criterion (per the GNU list of licenses), the bullet has been simplified to:
Furthermore, all code, pseudo-code, schema, data tables, cascading style sheets, and interface definition language is licensed under the W3C Software License.
This change thus removes the unintended grant of patent licenses and still aims to satisfy GPL-compatibility.
Note There is currently discussion in the PSIG about whether this provision should be part of the license. Views differ on whether it is unnecessary (since the first provision in the license covers code portions as well) or indeed valuable (since the second license is well-known and unambiguous).
The staff has elected to start the survey before the PSIG has reached consensus due to the timing of the AC meeting. There will be time after the AC meeting to make further adjustments, based on AC feedback and PSIG discussion.
Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>.
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