Anne van Kesteren

CC0

Standards developed by the WHATWG are licensed under CC0 (variant of Public Domain that works globally). The HTML Standard is licensed under MIT for historical reasons. This is important for these reasons:

The W3 Project at CERN had the same policy as the WHATWG: The definition of protocols such as HTTP and data formats such as HTML are in the public domain and may be freely used by anyone. Tim BL Nowadays the W3C employes a more restrictive W3C document license that does not allow for derivative works and requires attribution.