One of the important things for developing a specification is providing an explicit license. This give third-party implementers the security to know that they're not walking into a patent or copyright minefield by implementing the specification. It's why the IETF and W3C require explicit descriptions of rights and licenses for all specs made by those bodies.
To make sure that implementers are aware that this spec is open to use and develop with, we've used the great Open Web Foundation Agreement 0.9 (OWFa) made available by the Open Web Foundation. It's an explicit copyright license and patent promise that's been carefully reviewed for use by open web specs like OStatus.
Not all of the technology that's collected in OStatus is currently under the OWFa, but some parts are: PubSubHubbub and Salmon were two of the specs specifically listed when the OWFa was introduced. Our discussions with other upstream spec developers on PoCo, Activity Streams and WebFinger suggest that they too will use the OWFa or something similar. So putting our application profile into the mix makes a lot of sense.
The new draft of the specification includes the license notification, and copies of the signed agreements will be made available on the OStatus site at http://ostatus.org/owfa/. (There's also one addition -- there was an identifier URI left out of draft 1 that we've now got added in!)
Thanks to the people at the OWF who made this great agreement. It's made it easy for use to give the right signal to the OStatus community.
