RE: software licenses

["Karl F. Best" <karl.best@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
>