Open Web Foundation Agreement Launched

Yesterday, DeWitt Clinton of Open Web Foundation announced that Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) is now available for use by the developers

The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with legal agreements that make such work simple, safe, and sustainable.

This is a very important step to keep the web open, democratic and neutral. Taking the vision from the predecessors like Open Source Movement, Creative Commons, etc., Open Web Foundation will act as a facilitator of open formats and protocols so that developers and users downstream need not worry about copyrights, patents, etc.. Already some big names like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. have committed to use OWFa to some of their formats/protocols like OAuth Core 1.0 Revision A, Pubsubhubbub, Salmom Protocol, etc..

It should be noted that any organization that commits their specification to OWFa need not make the format/protocol open/community based. They can still keep it proprietary and be committed to OWFa. This is very liberal in that sense. It is a strategically wise move too. Such a liberal approach will bring more and more companies to OWFa, thereby benefiting the users and developer community. Kudos to Open Web Foundation for this and I am glad we have taken yet another step towards an open world.

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