Please review CG Report requirements

[ianbjacobs]

Hi all,

In looking at a sample Solid technical report such as: https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol

I would like to draw the CG's attention to our CG Report requirements: https://www.w3.org/community/reports/reqs/

Among them notably, we have style requirements (to help people understand the status of documents) and copyright statement requirements (per the CG policies), etc.

I'd like to request that the CG make appropriate changes based on these requirements. Don't hesitate to contact me on team-community-process if you have questions.

Cheers, Ian

[1] https://www.w3.org/community/about/process/summary/

[ianbjacobs]

Hi all,

Our CLA deed explains what contributors give under the CLA:

Under the CLA, each contributor gives everyone:

   * Copyright – a royalty-free license to use the copyrights for their Contributions; see section 2 of the agreement.
   * Patent – a commitment to license on a royalty-free basis their essential patent claims reading on their Contributions; see sections 3 and 12 of the agreement as well as section 9 regarding transition to the W3C Recomendation Track.

@CxRes, you wrote "I had signed the CLA ... under the assumption that my contributions ... will be available to the world at large". That is also my expectation per the CLA deed.

If you have any additional questions, let me know.

[CxRes]

@ianbjacobs Unfortunately, as I see it, things are not that simple...

The CLA deed that you refer to has no legal standing. It says so right in the document:

The following is a handy, human-readable expression of key terms of the CLA. This summary is not the actual agreement. This summary has no legal value or effect and its contents do not appear in the actual agreement.

FWIW, the preceding line also makes it clear actual CLA is an agreement between "I" and "you":

The W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA) expresses the full agreement between the contributors (“I” in the license agreement) and you (“you” in the license agreement).

The CLA proper does not specify the term "everyone". AFAICT, the CLA does not specify how the "you" (entity who exercises the copyright) to which "I" (the contributor) have made the contribution, then licenses the resulting specification. In other words, there seems to be a massive gap between our shared expectations to make our contributions free and open to "everyone" and the reality of the CLA which is a limited agreement from "I" to "you", with no obligations on "you" except the attribution requirement in 2.2.

Suffice to say, this is also a deviation from the normal practice in the industry, where CLA and licenses are separate.

[ianbjacobs]

@CxRes,

The CLA says: "12.9. You or Your. “You,” “you,” or “your” means any person or entity who exercises copyright or patent rights granted under this CLA, and any person or entity that person or entity controls."

There is no restriction to "any person" that I am aware of.

[CxRes]

@ianbjacobs

(EDIT: That's not the question at all. Though signing a CLA with a Project where the counterparty is any body is weird, suppose I even grant your contention) In what way are "you", in this case the Solid CG (a member in the "any person" cohort), exercising that copyright that "I" the contributor am granting you? Are "you", for example, going to publish the specifications resulting from the "my" contributions under a permissive license or, for the sake of argument, charge someone a fee for redistributing or implementing it (Since "you" are allowed to reproduce, sublicense, distribute etc. it in any way per 2.1). The CLA holds the "I" who is signing it accountable, and not the "you" accountable in any way except 2.2 (even that is legally questionable since "you", by the interpretation you are choosing, might not even a party to the contract).

What I am demanding here is that the W3C Solid CG (which is a separate legal entity from any individual contributors signing the CLA, for otherwise "I" could never sign a contract i.e. the CLA, with the W3C Solid CG), the "you" in this case, in exercising the copyright that "I" have granted "you" to publishing the specification, specify to what extant it waives its rights over the said copy. Also, in general, to what standards is a W3C BG/CG supposed to hold themselves to, when they reproduce a specification developed from contributors' contributions? That is what I expect to be clearly stated in a copyright statement on every specification.

[ianbjacobs]

All participants agree upon joining the group to the CLA for their contributions to a Specification. Through the CLA, a contributor agrees to the copyright/patent/other terms for "any person or entity exercises copyright or patent rights granted under this CLA." The copyright/patent grants are available to anyone who uses the Specification. That includes the ability to make derivative works (with attribution).

How participants in the Solid community make agreements regarding contributions to work before it reaches a CG is outside of my purview.

[CxRes]

The copyright/patent grants are available to anyone who uses the Specification.

Including the CG, which exercises that copyright when it publishes a specification.

I am pained to stress that, just because individual contributors have waived their rights of contributions to a body of work, does not automatically imply that a particular copy of the published work is freely available (this is literally the acedemic publishers' business model). A publisher can "without any obligation for accounting to me" republish/reuse the spec in any way it deems fit.

In this circumstance and at the risk of repeating myself, I cannot help but demand that the CG (a separate entity from any individual contributor and not an "I" in the CLA) in its capacity as a publisher of these specifications explicitly specify, what claims it makes/waives on the copy it publishes in the copyright line, preferably through a license.

Let me again stress that CG was already doing this for seven year, until about a month ago, when it abruptly switched templates.

How participants in the Solid community make agreements regarding contributions to work before it reaches a CG is outside of my purview.

Not at all what I am asking about! Please do not strawman the argument. This is about contributions that were made to the CG while it was publishing specifications under the MIT License.

[elf-pavlik]

@CxRes, I'm getting the impression that you are losing your patience. Please remember that everyone engaging in the discussion does their best to help.

Could you describe a concrete scenario or two that you believe would be possible under the CLA and that you would like to prevent from happening? This way, we could clarify if the suggested scenario is possible under the CLA, and if it is, is it a future or a bug?

[ianbjacobs]

@CxRes, I believe I now understand your question regarding the license of the specification as an aggregation of contributions. Let me come back to you on this.

[CxRes]

@elf-pavlik Yes and thanks for the friendly intervention. My experience coming from academia is that academics routinely waive their rights only for publishers to profit of their (typically public funded) work in increasingly devious schemes. This is not about coming up with a scenario but about the principle. If I am making a contribution to an ostensibly open source project, it is reasonable to ask that the custodians of the project will also commit to keeping the work open. By explicitly stating that it will do the right thing in black and white on top of each spec on the copyright line. Solid CG did so for 7 years and thats why I contributed. The reluctance to do so now speaks volumes.

Changing of licenses should not be done on a whim. Licenses is serious stuff with serious consequences. See the Conservancy v Vizio lawsuit, for example.

[ianbjacobs]

Hi @CxRes,

I don't think there's any reluctance. The group has been doing some cleanup, as requested by the staff. I mentioned the CLA deed earlier, which sets a very clear expectation about open licensing. If we have a glitch we will fix it with that goal in mind. Please stay tuned while I do some investigation.

[CxRes]

@ianbjacobs Sure. Thanks!

May I also point out Solid CG by its charter also requires the work items are released under W3C Software and Document License.

[ianbjacobs]

May I also point out Solid CG by its charter also requires the work items are released under W3C Software and Document License.

I'm not sure yet whether that's relevant, but thank you for the heads-up on that.

[michielbdejong]

I think nothing stops us from dual-licensing reports. So I think the appropriate course of action would be to add a W3C license to all our work items/reports, so that we at least now start complying with our own charter, even if they already are (and possibly stay) MIT-licensed as well.

After reading Rahul’s comment I do agree with him that this statement:

HOWEVER, the publication of derivative works of this document for use as a technical specification is expressly prohibited.

is a bit surprising to me, does that also hold if the technical report in question explicitly mentions its sources with attribution?

And what if this derivative work is itself W3C-licensed?

I mean, our 0.10 spec is obviously a derivative work of our 0.9 spec, right?

Can we read somewhere about why that "HOWEVER" was added and how it is to be interpreted if the derived work in question does fairly mention that it was derived from a CG report? Having people derive work from our work is, to me, a goal of our work as a CG, and not a problem to be prohibited right?

[CxRes]

@michielbdejong I can give you some context on:

HOWEVER, the publication of derivative works of this document for use as a technical specification is expressly prohibited.

This line is from the W3C Document License which WG's typically use. @elf-pavlik was only enquiring about my preference there.

This is not an issue of contention because the CG, by its charter, is required to use W3C Software and Document License which is essentially an MIT clone to include documents and does not have any such restriction.