Conformance to CCTS Spec: Legal Aspects

["Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@bah.com>]

Kathryn,

This e-mail is regarding the legal aspects of our level of conformance
to the CCTS spec in our Core Components Review work. We are beginning
our Technical Note, and the title of our note (as well as references
within it) will be fully dependent on the conformance issues I cite in
this e-mail.

We have seen that there are various requirements in the current CCTS
spec that we cannot conform with because such conformance does not make
sense in light of our registry architecture. Additionally, having been
informed of the feedback to the UN/CEFACT CCTS Team from at least one
other group, it appears to me that some additional updates may take
place to the current CCTS spec before it reaches final approval. If so,
this would delay our implementation of what we consider to be a
long-needed and critical feature of our architecture. We may not want to
delay this feature any longer.

Regarding conformance, p.10 of the CCTS spec states:

"Applications will be considered to be in full conformance with this
technical specification if they comply with the content of normative
sections, rules and definitions."

As per our analysis of the CCTS spec against our registry architecture,
we will not (and cannot) be in full conformance with the CCTS spec in
its current form. This leaves several options:

(1) Notify the CCTS Team of those places where we will not be in
conformance (we will do this), and have the CCTS Team update their spec
accordingly;

OUR THOUGHTS: The CCTS Team is under no obligation to do so, any more
than we are under an obligation to be 100% conformant with their spec.

(2) Notify the CCTS Team of those places where we will not be in
conformance, and assume that they may/may not update their spec
accordingly; we will call our Technical Note "Implementing UN/CEFACT
ebXML Core Components in an ebXML Registry";

OUR THOUGHTS: Since the CCTS spec is copywritten, can we call our
Technical Note "Implementing UN/CEFACT ebXML Core Components in an ebXML
Registry" if we are not in 100% conformance?

(3) Notify the CCTS Team of those places where we will not be in
conformance, and assume that they may/may not update their spec
accordingly; we will not use the term "UN/CEFACT ebXML Core Components"
in the title of our Technical Note, but will instead call something like
"Component-Level Registration and Reuse in an ebXML Registry". We will
state that our work is *based on* the UN/CEFACT ebXML Core Components
specification.

OUR THOUGHTS: We are not sure of the legal ramifications of this, since
the CCTS spec is copywritten.

We would like to request that this issue be raised with both the proper
OASIS and UN/CEFACT representatives so that it may be investigated from
the legal side. We would also like your perspective on this issue, and
where you feel we should go from here.

Thanks,
The Core Components Review Subteam
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