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Nov. 18, 2009

The OWF (Open Web Foundation) just said that it has released its Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFA) and the first 10 specification standards that are under this new agreement.

The OWFA is akin to an open source licence for specifications, allowing organizations to place specific standards under a common recognized license.

Overall, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and "Safe Mash Ups" are the first companies to make use of the new specifications.

The 10 specifications now under an OWF Agreement are O-Auth Core 1.0, OAuth WRAP 0.9PDF, Google's PubSubHubbub and Salmon Protocol, Simple Web Tokens 0.9PDF, MashSSL 1.2.0, Yahoo's Media RSS 1.5.0 and Microsoft's Web Slice Format 0.9, XML Search Suggestions Format and OpenService Format Specification 0.8.

The idea behind the OWF is to streamline the process of developing standards on the Web, traditionally, a specification would be presented to a standards body and go through a standardization process, including draft versions and feedback, eventually appearing as a final standard, but this process takes time.

With the OWF Agreement however, anyone can take a snapshot or specific version of a specification and release it, allowing other companies to implement it without fear of copyright or patent repercussions. The process doesn't stop the standardisation process, however.

For example, Safe Mashups are also incubating their Mash-SSL specification with the W3C while releasing the current version under the OWFA.

Overall, the OWF have also published a simple deed which explains what is given (a free license and patent rights), what is allowed (to share, revise and implement the specifications), attribution requirements and how the agreement works in patent disputes.

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Source: The Open Web Foundation.

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