[Fedora-legal-list] Packaging of standards in Fedora: Standards versus Documentation

[Daniel Veillard]

 Hi Danny,

sorry to bother you but I realized that my packaging of HTML-4.01 DTDs
for fedora had to be modified to not include the text of the HTML
specification from the package:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/process_bug.cgi#c22

 I though that was weird the goal is to make the W3C technical specifications
as widely availble as possible, checking further I found out that the reason
is that the Licence doesn't allow modification of the standards

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#head-d8cc605dd386091c8b6be97b8a43fb6a5d624ae1-2

 I think W3C position makes perfect sense, you don't want another organization
to ship modified version of the XML standard specifications for examples
or at least not calling them XML or W3C documents. On the other hand 
in general Fedora own principle to force documentation to be modifiable
can be considered good for the users, for example to provide translations
or corrections.
 But I feel disturbing that as a result of this conflict we simply can't
ship any of the W3C specifications as part of Fedora. In that case clearly
the position taken by both entities ends up being against the people good.

  I don't know if there is a way to solve this, maybe consider standard
specification as special case in Fedora. But I feel the core of the issue
is not a matter of modification, it's rather a branding problem, making
a derivation of the spec is not in the absolute a problem, it's claiming 
that it's still the spec (and in this case the result of W3C process and 
carrying the stapm of approval after the changes). Wouldn't that requirement
on usage be better addressed with a different mechanism like a trademark
rather than a rather strict 'you cannot modify this text and redistribute it'
which I feel doesn't fully address the point.

  In any way I would look forward a solution allowing to ship W3C standard
specification as part of Fedora,

  thanks in advance for any suggestion you could provide on the matter,

Daniel

-- 
Red Hat Virtualization group http://redhat.com/virtualization/
Daniel Veillard      | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine  http://rpmfind.net/