iipc
No license
There is no license. Could this be fixed? I suggest using CC-BY 4.0 license
I agree, it's problematic to have no license, and CC-BY-4.0 is a good suggestion.
However, this is something which can only really be decided by the 14 existing contributors, and, the IIPC itself.
As one of the people involved in setting up this GitHub repository, I can at least give some context. The 'real' (authoritative) WARC specification is the ISO standard. However, the draft versions have long been made available via https://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/, and this project was set up on that basis. The intention was that this space can act as a community forum to provide feedback to the formal standardisation process, but what happens here places no formal obligations upon the ISO committee.
The file(s) corresponding to the authoritative specification are managed independently of the files held here, which were generated from an earlier version of the official specification. The two strands are kept in sync manually, on a best-effort basis. This version remains, at best, a non-authoritative draft that is not intended to e.g. act as the basis for derivative works.
In my opinion, any formal licensing would imply a level of authority that is not justified given the lack of integration with the ISO process. If so, resolving this would require a formal agreement with the relevant ISO stakeholders.
Thanks for the explanation Andy, I had forgotten that the WARC format was actually a (proprietary?) ISO standard. It would be useful to outline that context in the readme, especially for anyone else who comes along thinking this is the real spec.
Besides the non-authoritative status of this repository, I'm more concerned with the rights of the community to read, modify, and ~~copy~~ archive the files here.
…the files held here, which were generated from an earlier version of the official specification. The two strands are kept in sync manually, on a best-effort basis. This version remains, at best, a non-authoritative draft…
Ah! I understood this was a copy and not where actual spec work/drafting happens, but I had always been under the impression this was a more official and authoritative copy than that (I think maybe because this is an IIPC repo? Not sure how I came to this view.).
It would be useful to outline that context in the readme
Definitely agree with @extua on that. 👍
The usual dance with the ISO is that you can distribute a draft that happens to be exactly identical with the final standard without having to pay the ISO. But indeed, every released official standards doc is proprietary to them.
This workaround is 20+ years old.
