Project FreeSpec

Champion

Clifford Yapp

Project Status: Cancelled (Sept. 2006)

Why the Freespec Project was Cancelled

The original Freespec project idea was to identify the copyright holders of the dpANS3 lisp specification document and obtain permission, if possible, to create derivative works. The virtual impossibility of doing this cleanly (i.e. obtaining all necessary permissions to be certain of release by all copyright holders) combined with the unexpected questions concerning standards development in relation to antitrust laws was enough for the original champion to call a hault to the project. Unfortunately, according to the U.S. Copyright Office website, it would be a minimum of 95 years before dpANS3 would be in the clear, and possibly much longer if copyright actually still rests with individuals and not organizations. This also assumes no further extensions to copyright are passed, which may be a risky assumption based on the recent history of copyright legislation.

The conclusion of the original champion was that rather than developing a standard as such, the thing to do was to develop a literate Lisp implementation in the style of Knuth's TeX and treat it as an academic work. This would mean writing a new document and citing the official ANSI spec and any other sources where appropriate. Such a work would not be written as or intend to be a specification, although conceivably it could be used as the basis of such an effort in the future. This type of project is not likely to be of interest to the wider lisp community, and hence the cl-gardener Freespec project was closed.

For more extensive background on the various questions involved, see below.

Overview - The ANSI Common Lisp Standard and Draft Documents

During the creation of the current ANSI Common Lisp specification (ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (R1999), previously known as ANSI X3.226-1994 (R1999) (printed version can be had here) a series of draft documents were published by the development group for public review. These documents, known as draft proposed American National Standards (dpANS), have no official status as standards but in later revisions match closely the content of the final specification. Unlike the final standard, which is subject to the control of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the dpANS documents are still publicly available at their original location in both dvi and tex form: ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/cl/ (2010 - down? mirror of some sort seems to be here: http://nntp.gnus.org/circus/cl/). dpANS2 and dpANS3 both match closely in content the actual ANSI specification, and represent a convenient way for those not able or willing to pay for the official standard to get an overview of its contents.

Besides the official specification documents, there are two high profile uses of the specification content. The Common Lisp Hyperspec, perhaps the most frequently cited resource for the Lisp language, is derived from the final ANSI standard and has specific permission from ANSI to use the content. Franz Inc, makers of the Allegro Lisp implementation also publish an online document derived from dpANS2. They claim copyright over the presentation of the language standard they offer. Neither of these forms of the specification are available for use in derivative works.

The work of putting together the original ANSI specification was very expensive (estimates range upwards of $400k). Originally, NCITS/J13 was established in order to maintain the ANSI standard for Common Lisp, but as of 2004 NCITS/J13 had ceased to maintain the minimum quorum membership to function. Steven M. Haflich, the J13 chair, maintains the document repository for NCITS/J13. This means, in effect, that there is no functioning method for revising the existing ANSI Common Lisp standard. It seems to be the general opinion that any renewed effort to update the offical standard would also be very expensive.

Community Activity

There is considerable debate in the community as to whether an update to the existing standard is necessary or desirable. Two organized efforts to provide organized standards (not official in the ANSI sense, but at least a forum for agreement) are CDR - Common Lisp Document Repository and Common Lisp Requests for Improvements (update - CLRI apparently gone from the internet now - 2010).

More informally, there exist several pages at the CLiki related to ANSI specification issues. These are wiki pages established for the purpose of suggesting various types of improvements to the existing standard.

Status of the dpANS Documents

While of less mainstream interest to the community, there is some interest in being able to base both documentation and new informal/proposed standardization documents off of the publicly available dpANS files. Unfortunately, the copyright status of these files is very confused.

Practically speaking, this means that even an exhaustive search to contact all organizations and individuals listed in the contributions page would not be able to achieve 100% clarification of the copyright and permissions status. In the event of a dispute of ownership of specific content, proof would be very difficult and expensive to produce. There may also be questions of joint copyright of jointly created works and conflicting opinions as to what permissions, if any, should be granted for derivative works.

Realistically, it is not clear that derivative works would encounter any trouble - many of the major players have moved on, and already the dpANS documents have been available for free download for over 10 years. Unfortunately, for many free software distributions presumption of permission is not sufficient - permission must be explicit. This prompted the removal of a dpANS based texinfo file from GNU Common Lisp.

There are extensive online discussions concerning these issues in various places:

A search of the comp.lang.lisp archives will also return a variety of discussions on the topic.

ANSI official standard contents

Although the dpANS content's copyright status is and will likely remain murky, there exists one other possibility - the content of the official ANSI spec itself is controlled by the ANSI organization. They appear to have the rights to grant licenses to use the content of the standard, as they did for the Common Lisp Hyperspec. Contact was attempted in 2005 by several prominent community figures asking that the text of the standard be released under a free license, but the effort appears to have stalled out.

Standards Organizations in the United States

Rather surprisingly, it would seem that there are possible antitrust law issues in the United States relating to standards creation. H.R. 1086 was passed in 2004 to "encourage the development and promulgation of voluntary consensus standards by providing relief under the antitrust laws to standards development organizations with respect to conduct engaged in for the purpose of developing voluntary consensus standards, and for other purposes." Which sounds encouraging, but also implies that for those WITHOUT this protection, there are potential issues with developing voluntary concensus standards. Otherwise, why would the law be needed in the first place?

Understanding this issue properly requires legal training this author does not have. Among the questions that must be answered are what actually constitutes a "Standards Development Organization" in a legal sense, what obligations must be met, and what the consequences would be for a group that is NOT an SDO, if they proceed to develop a new standard.

ANSI prepared a memorandum to their Accredited Standards Developers attempting to answer some basic questions about the new legislation. It does not constitute legal advice, but does raise a number of interesting points.

In particular, A6 of the above document states that "The Act protects only the standards developing organization. According to Section 108 of HR 1086, the entities involved in the standards-setting activity are in the same position relative to the antitrust laws as before the passage of the Act." What position is this? Is there risk to individuals who become members of such organizations?

When discussing such issues, the question naturally arises as to who would be interesting in bringing legal action against an informal volunteer group. It is not clear if any action would be brought, but conceivably commercial vendors left out of the process (if only by not being actively brought in) could have objections to such a standard being developed. Such a standard would stand a fair chance of impacting their business as customers request features defined in the new documents. Original contributors to the ANSI process have indicated that there were some strong interests in how the original standard was developed. It is not clear if such an environment would still exist today but in an all volunteer group with no revenue stream to fund any legal defense, ANY legal action would be disasterous for those involved.

This page is linked from:

Gardeners Projects Liberate dpANS3