On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:33 PM, Mike Edwards wrote:
Philipp,
The point I'm trying to get at with the statement you picked out is that we need that:
1) It MUST be the case that a document exists for the Implementation Type and that a version of the Test Suite also exists
2) It MUST also be the case that the Implementation Type document and the Test Suite version are "freely available"
- the document should be available publicly with a license that permits anyone to obtain a copy ("equivalent" terms to
those applying to OASIS public specifications, but not requiring the document to be published by OASIS and not requiring
it to use OASIS terms)
- the Test Suite should be available freely - and in my thinking that would mean available from a public location under
an accepted open source license. Again, does not have to be available from OASIS and we can be flexible about the
license, but what I don't want to see is the ability for a vendor to tie the Test Suite to the purchase of a product, or to
place restrictive terms on its availability. I think that the base test suite is really a piece of open source and that this
modified implementation specific version of the test suite is simply building on that base.
This does NOT imply that a commercial company has to make their SCA runtime freely available, of course - so
to actually RUN the test suite it may well be necessary to buy a license for the runtime. However, "the court of public
opinion" which is what is really being used to police the conformance here, requires that the test suite can be
inspected freely, even without being able to run it - for example, a company make make short cuts in its implementation
of the test suite, which should be open to comment.
I don't know if any of this is really going to work - how can an OASIS specification make demands of this kind and have
any expectation that they will be honoured? - I suspect that we are blazing a trail into new territory here as I am not aware
of a standards TC having made requirements of this kind before...
There is plenty legal precedent for enabling this. More importantly, this needs to be done regardless of whether the SCA specifications allow conformance using non-OASIS standardized implementation languages.
To start with the latter first, in order to be conformant a vendor must implement test case artifacts, for example, RuntimeBridge. If these artifacts are not made available, independent conformance verification will not be practical. This is the same problem as requiring a language implementation specification to be made available.
One possible way to solve this general problem is to do what many open source licenses do (e.g. copyleft) and provide a provision that derivative works be made available under the same licensing terms as the original.
Jim |