The Open Web Foundation (OWF)
The Open Web Foundation (OWF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development and protection of specifications for emerging web technologies. The foundation follows an open source model similar to the Creative Commons. OWF is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specifications.
Historical Note
The Open Web Foundation was announced July 24th, 2008 at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). Facebook has announced their support for the OWF, as well as Google, MySpace, Six Apart, Plaxo and others. Through OWF, Google and Facebook now have an appropriate venue where they can resolve their differences between Facebook Connect and OpenSocial platforms, as well as work on a standard way to have their users interact with each other. The OWF also provides the technical details, as well as policy details, on how these protocols and emerging technologies interact.
Individuals participating include Geir Magnusson, vice president and board member at Apache, and Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media.
The Agreements
The Open Web Foundation currently provides two agreements for specification development purposes, a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa).
Contributor License Agreement — Contribution Copyright Grant
The Open Web Foundation Contributor License Agreement (“CLA 0.9”) – Contribution Copyright Grant is intended to apply during the development phase of a specification project. The purpose of the CLA 0.9 is to define the copyright grant, as well as warranty disclaimers and other legal terms, that apply to contributions to a project, so that all participants are free to create and publish copies and derivative works of those contributions.
Projects should require contributors to sign this CLA 0.9 before accepting contributions from those contributing companies or individuals.
Note that there are no patent grants in this CLA 0.9.
Open Web Foundation Agreement
The Open Web Foundation Agreement (“OWFa 0.9”) is designed to be applied to specifications that are either considered ready for deployment or are already currently in use. OWFa 0.9 contains both copyright and patent grants to allow anyone to make, use and sell implementations of the specification.
The OWFa 0.9 agreement may be applied to specifications regardless of the development model for the specifications. For example, OWFa 0.9 may be used with community developed specifications, specifications independently developed by an individual or corporation, or specifications developed by a standards body.
- Deed. The human readable deed that describes the OWFa 0.9.
- OWFa 0.9. The legal agreement.
- How To. How to use the OWFa.
Draft Agreements
Open Web Foundation webiste announces a number of draft agreements announced that are currently pending for approval by Open Web Foundation Legal Committee Co-Chairs.
