Refining joint deliverables guidance when a non-WG group is involved about guide HOT 2 OPEN

Thanks @frivoal for raising this issue.

As a WG chair I've had a few cases where a non-participant has proposed a substantive contribution to a WG's deliverable and in follow-ups clearly signalled is not in a position to join the WG.

One such case we resolved using https://www.w3.org/2023/Process-20230612/#contributor-license while in another similar situation this mechanism did not work out for the contributor for undisclosed reasons. So in my experience "License Grants from Non-Participants" did work 50% of the time.

I think it would be helpful to provide guidance to WG chairs on how to resolve such issues and having a Guide pointer would be great with an understanding we may not be able to solve all such issues.

I trust @plehegar and @frivoal are able to come up with a good text for the Guide that we can improve over time as we learn more.

from guide.

So in my experience "License Grants from Non-Participants" did work 50% of the time.

Alternatively, we could say that 100% of the time, it did ensure that we did not end up with patent encumbered stuff in our spec :)

But +1 to having some guidance about that in the Guide.

from guide.