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="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/">
<img alt="CC0" 
     src="https://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="https://www.openwebfoundation.org/the-agreements/the-owf-1-0-agreements-granted-claims/owfa-1-0">
Open Web Foundation Agreement Version 1.0</a>,
which is available at 
https://www.openwebfoundation.org/the-agreements/the-owf-1-0-agreements-granted-claims/owfa-1-0.
</small></p>

If you don't want to hotlink an image from creativecommons.org, or don't want to use an image for CC0 for any reason, you may alternatively just use text:

<p class="copyright"><small>
Per <a rel="license" 
   href="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/">
CC0</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="https://www.openwebfoundation.org/the-agreements/the-owf-1-0-agreements-granted-claims/owfa-1-0">
Open Web Foundation Agreement Version 1.0</a>,
which is available at 
https://www.openwebfoundation.org/the-agreements/the-owf-1-0-agreements-granted-claims/owfa-1-0.
</small></p>

MediaWiki

<small>Per [https://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 [https://www.openwebfoundation.org/the-agreements/the-owf-1-0-agreements-granted-claims/owfa-1-0 Open Web Foundation Agreement Version 1.0].</small>

Example Specifications

Here are some specifications that use CC0+OWFa:

IndieWebCamp

• IndieAuth Living Standard
• Micropub Living Standard
• Webmention original draft

microformats

• microformats2 parsing
• microformats2 vocabularies:
  • h-adr
  • h-card
  • h-entry
  • h-event
  • h-geo
  • h-item
  • h-product
  • h-recipe
  • h-resume

WHATWG

• CSS Books
• CSS Figures

The following specs all used to have the CC0+OWFa markup noted above, but at some point (2016?2015?) had that replaced with plain text CC0 only text, and later (2017?) then CC-by-4.0, with BSD 3-clause for any source code. -t

• DOM
• DOM Parsing and Serialization
• Encoding
• Fetch
• Fullscreen API
• JavaScript, aka. Web ECMAScript
• MIME Sniffing
• Notifications API
• Quirks
• URL
• XMLHttpRequest

See Also

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