w3c / licenses

License documents for W3C repositories

licenses

Noodling on license advertisements

This repository is for texts describing the contribution terms of repositories for WGs, CGs, IGs governed by the W3C process and licenses.

To use these licenses, put the relevant pair of documents (CONTRIBUTING.md and LICENSE.md) into the root of a repository as CONTRIBUTING.md and LICENSE.md

licenses's Issues

non-substantive contributions to WG shouldn't require licensing commitment

as far as I know, we should not ask or require patent commitments for a pull requests that has no substantive impact on a spec (e.g. typos, formatting, some rewording, etc.).

Is there a way to amend WG-contributing.md to reflect that?

template files for Notes

the contribution and licensing docs seems to be geared towards document under the patent policy RF commitment; it would be good to add their equivalent for other type of documents, WG Notes in particular. @wseltzer @plehegar ?

cc @anssiko

[CG CONTRIBUTING.md] point to LICENSE.md for terms under which contributions are made.

In the Web-NFC CG CONTRIBUTING.MD file it says as the second sentence:

"All contributions are made under the terms described in the LICENSE.md file.".

As it is that just talks about the CLA which doesn't apply at all to non-specification reports. Better to also point to the LICENSE file so they know all their contributions will be licensed as that LICENSE file indicates.

Suggestions: specify how to ID contributors

[suggestions from Wayne Carr]
In the part in CONTRIBUTING.md about specifying the contributors, it would be good to specify how to do that. In the charter on the Community Group site, it says: "In the commit, if practical, this information should be in the form {Contributors: ["@GitHubUsername1","@githubusername2"]}." The particular format Robin should provide. The one we use is a very simple JSON object. Tools could pick up incorrectly formatted text by flagging comments with usernames that aren't in the right form for manual processing. So, "@hendrix hates this idea." doesn't automatically make hendrix a contributor to it :)

The reason to specify it is that you need to know something about the format to be able to create tools that automate determining who the contributors are. (In the W3C account information, users could provide their GitHub username so we can tell where they make GitHub contributions).

Plain document license doesn't work

By contributors licensing under document license, W3C does not acquire sufficient rights. You have only thought distribution and not acquisition. W3C needs both.