[Fwd: RE: software licenses]

[Lauren Wood <lauren@softquad.com>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: software licenses
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 15:12:25 -0400
From: "Karl F. Best" <karl.best@oasis-open.org>
To: Lauren Wood <lauren@sqwest.bc.ca>, chairs@lists.oasis-open.org

OASIS is obliged by the TC Process to archive the mail list archives for the
life of the corporation.

TC web pages aren't obliged to be so permanent, but I intend not to ever
delete anything; we'll just move the link to the page to an "old" category,
but the pages themselves should stay under their current URL for quite a
while.

I don't think the OASIS copyright and IPR would apply to non-TC work, but
perhaps John could submit his work as a note of some sort (sorta like a W3C
note?) that has no normative vallue but still nice to be able to refer to.
Or, just include it as an attachment to a mail message then you can point to
the URL of that message in the archive.

</karl>
=================================================================
Karl F. Best
OASIS - Director, Technical Operations
978.667.5115 x206
karl.best@oasis-open.org  http://www.oasis-open.org


 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: Lauren Wood [mailto:lauren@softquad.com]
 > Sent: Monday, June 18, 2001 7:13 PM
 > To: chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
 > Subject: software licenses
 >
 >
 > An issue has arisen in the Entity Resolution TC which I think has
 > to be solved at an OASIS level, and I think some discussion
 > amongst the chairs will also be useful.
 >
 > The situation is that we have a specification, which is covered by
 > the OASIS copyright, and basically nobody can change it except
 > for the committee. That's fine.
 >
 > Then we have some code, in this case code written by John
 > Cowan, which implements certain bits of the specification or
 > related ideas (e.g., to translate 9401 catalogs to xcatalogs). John
 > wishes these to be basically public domain, changeable, he wants
 > to be known as the original author, and also wants the code to be
 > available for some time. Howver, it is not a work product of the
 > committee.
 >
 > So there are a few issues here.
 > 1) OASIS has (at least implicitly) guaranteed that work products of
 > the committee will be available ad infinitum
 > 2) how long can we expect the web pages of committees to
 > remain, once the committee has been disbanded?
 > 3) how long can we expect mail archives of committees to remain,
 > once the committee has been disbanded?
 > 4) what happens to related products such as code which the
 > committee itself doesn't produce, but they are useful and it would
 > be handy to have them somewhere for people to find, even if the
 > committee itself doesn't exist any more?
 >
 > Until such time as the web page for the ER TC disappears, we can
 > link to the code from there, and we can also link to the email
 > archives until they also disappear. But we need to know how long
 > that might be.
 >
 > I can imagine other TCs might want to release software as part of
 > the committee work; W3C found it necessary to have a separate
 > software license since conditions on software and documents are
 > different. I think this could be necessary for OASIS as well.
 >
 > Lauren
 >

-- 
-----------

Lauren Wood, Director of Product Technology, SoftQuad Software
Chair, XML 2001 - Call for presentations now open at www.xmlconference.org