Subject: New version of License Draft

From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 09:41:22 -0700

Following the round of last-call comments, I have published an update to
the Feed license draft.

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-snell-atompub-feed-license-09.txt

There are a number of important changes:

 * License links in feeds are now inherited by entries

    If an entry element does not contain a "license" link relation, then
    the "license" link relation of the containing feed or contained
    source element, if present, is considered to apply to the entry.

   This has been the most debated aspect of this draft and I know there
   are folks who will disagree with this decision. However, the majority
   of folks who took the time to comment on this favored an inheritance
   model similar to that used by the atom:rights element.

 * I've introduced an "unspecified license link".  This is a special
   href attribute value that can be used to indicate that a license has
   not been explicitly associated with a feed or entry.  This is
   particularly useful for republishers and aggregators who wish to
   indicate whether or not the entries they are republishing originally
   had license links, e.g.,

   <feed>
     ...
     <link rel="license" href="http://example.org/license" />
     ...
     <entry>
       ...
       <link rel="license"
             href="http://purl.org/atompub/license#unspecified" />
       ...
     </entry>
   </feed>

   The presence of a unspecified license link does not mean that the
   entry doesn't have a license, just that the license has not been
   specified.

 * I've clarified that the license link is intended only to provide a
   potentially machine readable description of explicit rights that
   have been granted for a resource.

I have requested that Lisa reissue the Last-Call on this. As always,
additional comments and feedback are requested and welcomed.

- James