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Submission request to W3C (W3C Team Comment)
We, W3C members Akamai Technologies, Inc., Art Technology Group, BEA Systems, Inc., Circadence Corporation, Digital Island, Inc., IBM Corporation, Interwoven, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems and Vignette Corporation hereby submit to the Consortium the following specification, comprising the following documents attached hereto:
which collectively are referred to as "the submission". We request the submission be known as the "ESI" submission.
Abstract
Edge Side Includes (ESI) is a language that makes assembling resources at the 'Edge' of the network possible. Together with the ESI Invalidation Protocol and the Edge Architecture Specification, these documents describe a new effort to allow Web servers, content generation engines and Web site operators to take advantage of Content Delivery Networks and Surrogates (also known as "reverse proxies").
Intellectual Property Rights
- Declaration of Akamai Technologies, Inc.
- Akamai Technologies, Inc. ("Akamai") may own patents or patent
applications which apply to the ESI Specification being submitted to the
W3C. If implementation of a W3C Recommendation based on the ESI
Specification requires the use of Akamai patents, Akamai will grant,
upon written request, a non-exclusive license under such patents on
reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, but only for the purpose of
complying with the Recommendation and provided that the licensee shall
not assert patent rights against Akamai or any other company for their
implementation of the W3C Recommendation. One condition of this license
shall be the party's agreement to not assert patent rights against
Akamai and other companies for their implementation of the W3C
Recommendation. Akamai expressly reserves all other rights it may have
in the material and subject matter of this contribution. The licensing
commitments made hereunder do not include any license for implementation
of other published specifications developed elsewhere but referred to in
this contribution.
Akamai expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
- Declaration of Art Technology Group
- Art Technology Group, Inc. ("ATG") may own patents or patent
applications which apply to the ESI Specification being submitted to the
W3C. If implementation of a W3C Recommendation based on the ESI
Specification requires the use of ATG patents, ATG will grant, upon
written request, a non-exclusive license under such patents on
reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, but only for the purpose of
complying with the Recommendation and provided that the licensee shall
not assert patent rights against ATG or any other company for their
implementation of the W3C Recommendation. One condition of this license
shall be the party's agreement to not assert patent rights against ATG
and other companies for their implementation of the W3C Recommendation.
ATG expressly reserves all other rights it may have in the material and
subject matter of this contribution. The licensing commitments made
hereunder do not include any license for implementation of other
published specifications developed elsewhere but referred to in this
contribution.
ATG expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
- Declaration of BEA Systems, Inc.
- BEA does not identify any intellectual property rights in the current
submission, but may own patents or hold other intellectual property
rights in this submission, or may identify subsequent contributions to
the W3C as containing such intellectual property rights. BEA reserves
all rights as to such intellectual property, but agrees to make
available to any W3C member on a nondiscriminatory and reasonable basis
rights to any such intellectual property as BEA may elect to contribute
in future W3C work on this submission.
In the event BEA elects to make such rights available, such rights shall be subject to the condition that the grantee shall not assert patent rights against BEA or any other company for their implementation of the W3C recommendation, and shall be provided "AS IS." BEA HEREBY EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, REGARDING ANY SUCH CONTRIBUTION, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTY THAT A CONTRIBUTION DOES NOT INFRINGE THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS OR IS FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
- Declaration of Circadence Corporation
Circadence Corporation ("Circadence") may own patents or patent applications that apply to the ESI Specification being submitted to the W3C. If implementation of a W3C Recommendation based on the ESI Specification ("the Recommendation") requires the use of Circadence patents, Circadence will grant, upon written request, a non-exclusive license under such patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, but only for the purpose of complying with the Recommendation and provided that the licensee shall not assert patent rights against Circadence or any other company for their implementation of the Recommendation.
Circadence expressly reserves all other rights it may have in the material and subject matter of this contribution. The licensing commitments made hereunder do not include any license for implementation of other published specifications developed elsewhere but referred to in this contribution. Circadence expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
- Declaration of Digital Island, Inc.
- Digital Island, Inc. ("Digital Island") may own patents or patent
applications which apply to the ESI Specification being submitted to the
W3C. If implementation of a W3C Recommendation based on the ESI
Specification requires the use of Digital Island patents, Digital Island
will grant, upon written request, a non-exclusive license under such
patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, but only for the
purpose of complying with the Recommendation and provided that the
licensee shall not assert patent rights against Digital Island or any
other company for their implementation of the W3C Recommendation. One
condition of this license shall be the party's agreement to not assert
patent rights against Digital Island and other companies for their
implementation of the W3C Recommendation. Under no circumstances shall
the grant of any license excuse any prior infringement of any Digital
Island patents. Digital Island expressly reserves all other rights it
may have in the material and subject matter of this contribution. The
licensing commitments made hereunder do not include any license for
implementation of other published specifications developed elsewhere but
referred to in this contribution.
Digital Island expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
- Declaration of IBM Corporation
- IBM may own patents or patent applications which apply to the ESI
specification being submitted to the W3C. If implementation of a W3C
standard based on the ESI specification requires the use of IBM patents,
IBM will grant, upon written request, a non-exclusive license under such
patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
IBM expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this "Contribution" including any warranty that this "Contribution" does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
- Declaration of Interwoven, Inc.
- Interwoven does not have any intellectual property that is infringed
by the ESI submission, nor any that would necessarily be infringed by
any conforming implementation of those specs.
In the unlikely event that we discover such an infringement in the future, we will at a minimum license the rights to develop necessarily conforming implementations of the specs on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
- Declaration of Oracle Corporation
- Oracle Corporation ("Oracle") may own patents or patent applications
which apply to the ESI Specification being submitted to the W3C. If
implementation of a W3C Recommendation based on the ESI Specification
("the Recommendation") requires the use of Oracle patents, Oracle will
grant, upon written request, a non-exclusive license under such patents
on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, but only for the
purpose of complying with the Recommendation and provided that the
licensee shall not assert patent rights against Oracle or any other
company for their implementation of the Recommendation. One condition of
this license shall be the party's agreement to not assert patent rights
against Oracle and other companies for their implementation of the
Recommendation. Oracle expressly reserves all other rights it may have
in the material and subject matter of this contribution. The licensing
commitments made hereunder do not include any license for implementation
of other published specifications developed elsewhere but referred to in
this contribution.
Oracle expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
- Declaration of Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. ("Sun") will negotiate Royalty-Free Licenses under any Essential Claims reading on any W3C Recommendation-track or Recommendation-level specifications relating to the ESI Submission to make, use, sell, offer for sale, or import implementations of the specifications. Sun expressly reserves all other rights it may have.
"Essential Claims" shall mean all claims in any patent or patent application, in any jurisdiction in the world, that a W3C Member (or a licensor or licensee, with reference to entities other than W3C Members) owns, or under which a W3C Member (or a licensor or licensee) has the right to grant licenses without obligation of payment or other consideration to an unrelated third party, that would necessarily be infringed by implementation of the Recommendation. A claim is necessarily infringed hereunder only when it is not possible to avoid infringing it because there is no non-infringing alternative for implementing the required portions of the Recommendation. Existence of a non-infringing alternative shall be judged based on the state-of-the-art at the time the specification becomes a Recommendation.
The following are expressly excluded from and shall not be deemed to constitute Essential Claims:
(1) any claims other than as set forth above even if contained in the same patent as Essential Claims; and
(2) claims which would be infringed only by
[a] portions of an implementation that are not required by the Recommendation, or
[b] enabling technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product or portion thereof that complies with the Recommendation but are not themselves expressly set forth in the Recommendation (e.g., semiconductor manufacturing technology, compiler technology, object oriented technology, basic operating system technology, and the like); or
[c] the implementation of technology developed elsewhere and merely incorporated by reference in the body of the specification.
For purposes of this definition, the specification shall be deemed to include only architectural and interoperability requirements and shall not include any implementation examples or any other material that merely illustrates the requirements of the specification.
(e) A RAND License shall mean a license that:
(i) shall be available to all implementers worldwide, whether or not W3C Members;
(ii) shall extend to all Essential Claims owned or controlled by the licensor and its affiliates;
(iii) may be limited in use to the extent used to implement what is required by the specification;
(iv) may be conditioned on a grant of a reciprocal license on these same terms to all Essential Claims owned or controlled by the licensee and its affiliates. For example, this reciprocal license must be available to all, and this reciprocal license may itself be conditioned on a further reciprocal license (from all, including the original licensee).
(v) may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees;
(vi) may not impose any further conditions or restrictions on the use of any technology, intellectual property rights, or other restrictions on behavior of the licensee, but may include reasonable, customary terms relating to operation or maintenance of the license relationship such as the following: audit (when relevant to fees), choice of law, dispute resolution.
(f) A Royalty-Free License shall have the same characteristics as a RAND License, except that a Royalty-Free license:
(i) may not be conditioned on payment of royalties, fees or other consideration except for the conditions permitted in the other clauses of the definition of RAND License other than clause (v).
(ii) shall not be considered accepted by an implementer who manifests an intent NOT to accept the terms of the Royalty-free license as offered by the licensor.
- Declaration of Vignette Corporation
- Vignette may have patents and/or patent applications (collectively
"Patents") relevant to the standard to be developed in relation to this
submission. However, Vignette has not performed a search or evaluation
of its patents and applications in order to verify it has no Patents
that are relevant to such standard. Except as noted below, in the event
that this contribution, or portions thereof, are adopted as a W3C
Recommendation, and the Recommendation cannot be practiced without the
use of one or more Patents, Vignette agrees upon written request to
grant a non-exclusive license under such patents on a non-discriminatory
basis and on reasonable terms and conditions, including royalty rates,
provided a similar grant under any licensee's patents within the scope
of the license granted to licensee is made available upon request to
Vignette. However, if Vignette identifies Patents essential to this
submission and it determines that it is not willing to grant licenses on
the terms listed above, it will endeavor to provide notification within
four weeks following the release of the relevant Proposed
Recommendation.
Vignette expressly reserves all other rights it may have in the material and subject matter of its contribution. Vignette expressly disclaims any and all warranties regarding this contribution including any warranty that this contribution does not violate the rights of others or is fit for a particular purpose.
Names
The following are registered marks refered to in this request or the submission:
IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation.
Specification
The submission may distributed within the membership of the W3C free of any fee. The submission may be distributed publicly free of any fee under the redistribution terms expressed in the W3C copyright statement.
Implementation
The following points should be noted as regards licensable technology involved in any third party implementations of the technology specified in the submission: None
Suggested Action
We suggest that the Consortium hold a workshop to discuss issues surrounding the Web's infrastructure, including those addressed by the submission.
Depending on the outcome of such a workshop, we suggest the Consortium initiate a Web Infrastructure Activity to address issues in distributing resources from Web servers to other network elements. The focus of the Activity would be the creation of technical reports, based in part on the submission documents.
Context
As the Web grows and gains acceptance, there is an increasing need to maintain scalability, reduce user-perceived latency and enhance reliability. Surrogates (intermediaries acting on behalf of the Web server) are a recognized means of offering these benefits; whether deployed near the Web server (as a 'reverse proxy') or throughout the network (in a 'content delivery network'), surrogates are an efficient means of distributing resources in a controlled manner.
Although there is pre-existing and ongoing work regarding caching and content distribution in the IETF (including the WREC, WEBI, CDI and OPES working groups/BoFs), it has largely been driven by web cache vendors. As a result, the development of mechanisms for Web servers to communicate metadata to surrogates and conventions that surrogates can exploit have been neglected, because the Web server and content generation communities have not been well-represented.
We feel that the W3C Membership represents these interests more effectively, and offers opportunity for wide implementation of resulting recommendations. W3C's focus on data formats, metadata and semantics make it a natural place for such development. By initiating work in this area, we feel that the resulting interoperability and increased functionality will enable the Web to maintain its growth.
This submission represents first steps towards that goal; it consists of a framework for the relationship between surrogates and origin servers, an out-of-band invalidation protocol for coherence, and an in-markup language that is tailored to caching, reducing the granularity of resource cacheability. Two submitting Members have already implemented the specifications in their surrogates, and others have committed to supporting them in their application servers.
Scope
Initially, we expect that the scope of the Activity would be limited to further development of the submission, including natural extension of the mechanisms therein, and alignment with other W3C efforts, including the XML Activity. Further work may include coordination with Activities such as XML Protocol and Semantic Web to develop means of integrating them into the Web infrastructure. Additionally, a workshop may identify additional areas of work.
We also would expect such an Activity to liaise with the IETF working groups listed above.
Resources
To help with this work, we expect to be able to provide the following resources to the consortium:
- Akamai Technologies
- co-hosting of a Web Infrastructure workshop
- one full-time, onsite engineer
- Circadence Corporation
- one part-time, offsite document editor
- Digital Island, Inc.
- one part-time, offsite document editor
- co-hosting of a Web Infrastructure workshop
- provision of interoperability test infrastructure
- IBM Corporation
- participation in all relevant technical activities
- Vignette Corporation
- co-hosting of a Web Infrastructure workshop
Change control
Should any changes be required to the document, and the W3C takes on the submission as part of an Activity, we would expect future versions to be produced by W3C process. Otherwise, we may make changes and may re-submit the specification for acknowledgement.
Contact
Inquiries from the public or press about this submission should be directed to:
- Akamai Technologies, Inc.
- Jeffrey Young, jyoung@akamai.com, +1 617 250 3913
- Art Technology Group
- Michele Spiewak, mspiewak@atg.com, +1 617 386 1000
- BEA Systems, Inc.
- Christina Grenier, christina.grenier@bea.com, +1 408 570 8330
- Circadence Corporation
- Kurt Holzberlein, KHolzberlein@circadence.com, +1 303 413 8854
- Digital Island, Inc.
- David Radoff, dradoff@digitalisland.net, +1 415 738 4286
- IBM Corporation
- Joe Anthony, jca@us.ibm.com, +1 919 543 1545
- Interwoven, Inc.
- Kathleen Means, kmeans@interwoven.com, +1 408 530 5718
- Oracle Corporation
- Julie Geer-Brown, julie.geer-brown@oracle.com, +1 650 607 5204
- Sun Microsystems
- Tony Hampel, tony.hampel@sfbay.sun.com, +1 408 276 6506
- Vignette Corporation
- Maury Lane, mlane@vignette.com, +1 512 741 4987
Submitted
this 13th day of June, 2001,
Mark Nottingham, Akamai Technologies, mnot@akamai.com
Fumi Matsumoto, Art Technology Group, fm@atg.com
Daniel Frantz, BEA Systems, Inc., dan.frantz@bea.com
John Basso, Circadence Corporation, JBasso@circadence.com
Dave Farber, Digital Island, Inc., dave@digitalisland.net
Arnaud Le Hors, IBM Corporation, lehors@us.ibm.com
Ronald Daniel, Jr., Interwoven, Inc., rdaniel@interwoven.com
Donald Deutsch, Oracle Corporation, donald.deutsch@oracle.com
Eve Maler, Sun Microsystems, elm@east.sun.com
Conleth O'Connell, Vignette Corporation, cso-w3c@vignette.com