[Minutes] SG Minutes 2020-05-18

[travisleithead]

Policy Update process (#116)

• foolip checked in with Jennifer (from LWG) on the status.
• othermaciej also checked into a better wording for 'automated' text in the privacy policy - checked out Apple.com privacy policy, which has some good human-readable/clear wording for this we can possibly re-use.
  • SG: we would also prefer readable by normal humans.
• foolip: should we take that up as a followup change? (vs. hold the initial commit of the privacy policy change)
• othermaciej: Leaning towards publishing what we have, file a separate issue to track.
  • Action: foolip to file the issue for followup with LWG.
    • DONE: Clarify "automated decision-making" in privacy policy #123
  • Action: foolip to merge PR Add WHATWG Website Privacy Policy #120
    • DONE

Non-normative changes (#63)

• foolip recently talked with domenic about this one.
• We seem stuck on what should require the full CLA process vs not.
• As heard from the editors: this is not too hard of a call for them to make.
• So, we could trust the editors to make this decision.
• Is there more to this that we need to consider?
• othermaciej: I see three related items
  1. How to decide what contributions won't have patent contributions. If it doesn't affect normative, then shouldn't effect essential claims.
  2. What provisisions do we have for copyright grant? (Not sure if Github terms cover this?)
  3. Not sure if lawyers will be comfortable with this.
  • To me seems reasonable to let editors make a judgement about non-normative vs normative.
• dbaron: worth separating copyright and patent: which do we care about here?
  • Non normative is relevant for patent, but maybe less so for copyright?
• travisleithead: what do we want as an SG?
• othermaciej: enable casual contributions is a good a thing.
  • Re: Copyright, what we'd want with license vs grant: prefer 'grant' for incoming material rather than have to enumerate licensed copyrights, so that we can adjust future spec license terms in the future if needed.
  • Our text: https://whatwg.org/ipr-policy#42-inbound-copyright-license-grant
  • Could have a minimium 'copyright only' CLA. Individual-only, for non-normative changes.
• dbaron: should probably preserve the ability to re-license (so want to get the appropriate grant) given our history of license changes over the years.
• SG recommendation is a copyright-only grant for individual contribution for non-normative changes (put this into a small CLA).
  • Action: foolip to prune out patent info from current individual CLA add non-normative requirement bit and present plausible option to LWG for review.

[annevk]

Instead of another CLA, could we just make it clear that when someone makes such a contribution they are making such a grant? That seems to work for other open source projects in which all of our companies participate as well.

[othermaciej]

We hoped that GitHub's terms of service might cover this, but we're not totally sure. Need legal review for this. If we conclude that we don't need a copyright-only individual agreement, we won't add one.

(FWIW WebKit does not require any copyright grant or equivalent sublicensing type license, contributors retain their own copyright. I'm not sure if the other open source browsers/engines require such a thing.)