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Comment by ChrisSD | Hacker News Reader

Sure but they are using the copyright to insist on attribution, which undermines the argument that they are simply against using the law. If they really didn't care they'd use CC0.

And in the quoted statement they are not saying the W3C should improve their process for forking WHATWG's work. They are saying the W3C shouldn't fork their work at all. So despite their specifically chosen license (with easy to understand layman's summary) are WHATWG against all forking? Or are they simply against the W3C?

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Most of your points are addressed by Ian in an old email:

"In the case of the WHATWG specifications, the licenses allow broad re-use, so that implementors can copy-and-paste text into their comment blocks, so that tutorial writers can copy-and-paste text into their documentation, so that experiments we haven't considered can spring up without inhibition, and so that, if the WHATWG stops being a good steward (like the W3C stopped being a good steward in the early 2000s), the next group of spec editors doesn't have to start from scratch." (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2014Apr/0034...)

Yes, they do in fact want to use state violence to insist on attribution. They don't want to use state violence to insist on the W3C going away, but they still want the W3C to go away. That seems reasonable to me.

This change to requiring attribution is actually fairly recent, and was made with some reluctance on the part of us editors, despite eventually agreeing it was the best path forward. See https://blog.whatwg.org/copyright-license-change

Thanks for the link! It's great to be able to read the reasoning behind decisions.

There is a typo in the third paragraph, first sentence, FYI. "Are not" is repeated.

  For example, there are derivative specifications ("forks") that are not are not prominently identified as copies of WHATWG standards

Typo fixed, thanks!

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