Quite right. But licensing a specification with a license designed for software is pretty darned strange. > This Specification is free software; even though

Quite right. But licensing a specification with a license designed for software is pretty darned strange. > This Specification is free software; even though This Specification is not software. And then you're left with the disturbing need to send the text of the GPL off to corporate lawyers to determine whether there are any bombs in the GPL when applied to a specification instead of a piece of software? Will implementing the specification contaminate our sources? Must we include a GPL 3 notification in our legal notices? To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, And the corporate lawyers will respond (as they always do) that the text of the GPL wasn't written by a lawyer and nobody really knows what it means because of numerous drafting errors. Using the GPL here senselessly and needlessly causes stress, and is a more than ample reason in itself not to use the standard. The one good thing is that they used an MIT license on the reference implementation, so we won't have to use clean room protocols to write our own implementation.