Bernhard Seefeld's Blog

What does Licensing a Specification under Creative Commons Actually Mean?

Like RSS and other formats Microsoft today released their draft specification for Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML under a Create Commons license. I will dig into the technical details later, but it is clear that should this gain some traction, it will be a quite significant contribution to the web (An earlier, similar draft specification unfortunately didn't get much attention).

But for now, I'm interested in a much more basic question: What implications on implementors does licensing of the specification under CC have? I mean, people are making quite a fuss of Microsoft using that license, but what is the actual benefit for me as implementor? Sure, there are certain things I'm allowed to do with the document (i.e. the form) per se, but what can I do with SSE (i.e. the information described in the document) that I can't do with something that is specified under a "All Rights Reserved" document? E.g., I would allowed to describe the protocol in my words anyway and I could choose any license for that version. It wouldn't be the official version, but neither would any CC-allowed derivate be. There seems to be limitation (i.e. no attribution or share-alike necessary) on the license of the code that implements SSE (thankfully). So far, I don't see the special case for specifications.

I can see that it is extraordinary, that Microsoft uses an essentially GPL-like license (the share-alike is what Microsoft calls a viral license), but they use it in a place where there seem to be no relevant practical consequences of doing so. There is nothing really "non-commercial" about it, as some claimed. The copyright and the license cover the form of the specification, not what is specified. And licensing the text under CC also has no apparent consequences on the patentability of the underlying ideas. So essentially I can sing the specification or print it on a t-shirt and I can modify it before doing so. What else? Why is everyone so excited about it? Even Tim Bray seems to take the CC-license as guarantee of it being legally unencumbered. And Tim obviously knows a lot about format specs. So, do I miss something?

Can someone help me out here?

Update: Philip Jacob asks the same question. No clear answer yet, but it seems that the CC-part in this context is just good PR and not much more. So then, the question remains what the lincesing-unrelated part about patents and Microsoft means. I find the formulation ("... agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions ...") pretty vague, although it at least sounds as meant in good spirit. Others have a less-optimistic interpretation here.