Standards Best Practice [WAS Re: License classification: Schema files for OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) standard]

[Robert Burrell Donkin <rd...@apache.org>]

On 11/11/11 14:26, Rob Weir wrote:

<snip>

> I am Chair of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, so if
> you have any concerns, best practices, etc., let me know and I can
> raise them with OASIS.  OASIS prides itself in the openness of its
> standards and with ODF specifically we have many open source
> implementations.  So if there is something we should be doing in our
> licenses that we're not currently doing, to make it easier for Apache
> to consume, please let me know.

IIRC and AIUI the major motivation behind the "no modification" clause
in many standards is to prevent confusion by rogue products. There are
other means by which this might be achieved, for example using trademark
law. (Hopefully people will jump in to correct any misunderstands.)

I like the clean copyright "no modifications" approach to passing off
but worry that there are some uses that standards bodies may wish to
encourage (for example, using automated generation or verification to
ensure accuracy or loading the document into computer memory at run time
for display on screen) that a court may later decide are not permitted
by the "no modification" rule. A rogue standards body might be able to
submarine unforeseen charges by this method.

(There are plenty of people on this list with more experience. So
hopefully people will jump in.)

Robert

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