Provide options on copyright/licensing (for unofficial drafts, in particular)

[npdoty]

As it is, any document with status "unofficial" automatically uses a Creative Commons Attribution license. This is a fine default, but it would be nice to have the option to place a W3C Copyright or a copyright license of the author's choice.

[marcoscaceres]

I agree. This seems like a nice feature.

[darobin]

For unofficial drafts, it's not superbly intuitive (but now documented: http://www.w3.org/respec/guide.html#copyrights-patents) but you can use additionalcopyrightholders to override the default CC-BY.

I'm not sure if we want to enable overriding the copyright on W3C drafts (it can be tweaked though).

[marcoscaceres]

Does this need documentation for how to achieve the above? I'm personally interested in this also.

[darobin]

The documentation says:

For all document types other than "unofficial", you can use additionalCopyrightHolders to indicate that the copyright is shared not just amongst the W3C's hosts but also with other organisations (typically this is used for documents developed jointly with another SDO such as the IETF). For unofficial documents, this simply replaces the default CC-BY license.

Does that answer your question or did I misunderstand?

[marcoscaceres]

I think what @npdoty and I are asking for is the ability to specify either a "license" (e.g., { "license" : "MIT" } or custom license text or URL).

[darobin]

Yes, and that much is already supported in "unofficial" drafts as documented above.

For drafts using one of the W3C specStatus, I am not convinced that it's a good idea to support this at this time since it would break pubrules (and run afoul of the current licensing policy — if that changes then I'll certainly change ReSpec).

So if you have use cases for overriding (instead of complementing) the copyright on W3C specStatuses please tell me about it, but without that I'll close this issue as addressed!

[marcoscaceres]

Yes, we certainly don't want to support that for "W3C specStatus" specs. It's exclusively for unofficial ones - that's exactly what @npdoty and I are requesting.

@darobin, I think you are talking past us because it's not clear to either @npdoty or I how to achieve what we want (even if it's possible). So, can you show us, with a simple respecConfig, how we would include an MIT license into a new "unofficial" spec?

[darobin]

This is the default unofficial spec:

http://www.w3.org/respec/examples/minimal-w3c.html?specStatus=unofficial

This is with a random copyright policy:

http://www.w3.org/respec/examples/minimal-w3c.html?specStatus=unofficial;additionalCopyrightHolders=Omar%20comin%27,%20don%27t%20mess%20wi%27%20da%20spec

So basically, in your config, just set additionalCopyrightHolders to whatever you need. The only problem is that you need to remember to remove it when switching to a W3C specStatus. That might warrant a bug.

[marcoscaceres]

puuurfect! 😸 sorry to make you do that, but the "additionalCopyrightHolders" is badly named, but does exactly what is being asked for.

I say close this.

[darobin]

It's badly named, and I'm concerned that people will forget to remove it when they switch to other specStatus. So I'll close this issue here since it works, but I've opened the more specific #263.