Standards/license

This page describes the licenses that Mozilla prefers to use for standards, in particular, CC0 and OWFa. Mozilla Legal has reviewed the use of CC0 and OWFa, both individually, and in combination and approved them for use with standards specifications. — Tantek (talk)

CC0 OWFa Preferred

CC0+OWFa is Mozilla's preferred method for licensing for standards specifications for the following reasons:

• CC0 provides
  • maximum flexibility for altering/changing/modifying/discussing specifications
  • ability to embed portions of a spec into code (which itself may use other open source licenses)
  • an internationally aware and compatible public domain license.
    • For this reason CC0 is preferred over similar liberal licenses such as other public domain dedications, or the US-centric MIT or BSD licenses (or any variants thereof).
• OWFa provides a standards-body-independent royalty-free patent declaration.

Markup

You may use the following markup in specifications to indicate that they are published with the CC0+OWFa dual license:

HTML

<p class="copyright"><small>
<a rel="license" 
   href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/">
<img alt="CC0" 
     src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/zero/1.0/80x15.png">
</a>
To the extent possible under law, the editors have waived 
all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. 
In addition, as of (today's date), the editors have made 
this specification available under the
<a rel="license"
   href="http://www.openwebfoundation.org/legal/the-owf-1-0-agreements/owfa-1-0">
Open Web Foundation Agreement Version 1.0</a>,
which is available at 
http://www.openwebfoundation.org/legal/the-owf-1-0-agreements/owfa-1-0.
</small></p>

MediaWiki

<small>Per [http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ CC0], to the extent possible under law, the editors have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. In addition, as of {{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY2}}, the editors have made this specification available under the [http://www.openwebfoundation.org/legal/the-owf-1-0-agreements/owfa-1-0 Open Web Foundation Agreement Version 1.0].</small>

Example Specifications

Here are some specifications that use CC0+OWFa:

• IndieAuth.com:
  • IndieAuth Spec
• microformats.org:
  • microformats2 parsing
  • vocabularies:
    • h-adr
    • h-card
    • h-entry
    • h-event
    • h-geo
    • h-item
    • h-product
    • h-recipe
    • h-resume
• WHATWG:
  • DOM
  • DOM Parsing and Serialization
  • Encoding
  • Fetch
  • Fullscreen API
  • MIME Sniffing
  • Notifications API
  • Quirks
  • URL
  • XMLHttpRequest

See Also

• Standards
• 2011-06-17 10 Practices for Good Open Web Standards Development