copyright and licensing issues

["Lauren Wood" <lauren@textuality.com>]

Richard Tobin raised the issue of the copyright on the DTD and 
schemas. We agreed to look at the issue.

The current OASIS policy on copyright and licensing is as written in 
the specification: 
"This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to 
others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it 
or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published 
and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any 
kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are 
included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this 
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing 
the copyright notice or references to OASIS, except as needed for the 
purpose of developing OASIS specifications, in which case the 
procedures for copyrights defined in the OASIS Intellectual Property 
Rights document must be followed, or as required to translate it into 
languages other than English."

To me this says that the DTD and schemas can be taken out as they 
"assist in its implementation" as long as the copyright notices 
remain. It would probably also be preferable for the specification 
itself to be added to any implementation as documentation; I think 
this would resolve any further potential problems with the copyright 
notices.

We could potentially separate out the DTD and schemas into separate 
documents to make including them (and not the full specification) in 
implementations easier.

Alternatively we could raise the issue with the OASIS board and 
suggest that something like the W3C software license, under which the 
DOM bindings (but not the specification) were released, may be 
suitable for DTDs/schemas/Java classes/etc. The W3C software license 
is at
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
and meets various organizations' needs.

Lauren

-- 
Lauren Wood, Textuality
Chair, XML 2003 http://www.xmlconference.org