RAND proposal

I have a few comments.

1) Less than adequate participation on this important debate. This is bad.
2) There's a line of reasoning that fears that if W3C doesn't endorse a RAND non-royalty-free standard that another group will do so, in essence forking the standards base. Perhaps. Consider the alternative though. Consider the blow to the W3C reputation if it gets abandoned by the core of the Free and Open Source software camps. KDE still suffers from their willingness to work with Non-Free software (Qt Libraries). Open Source and Open Standards stand or fall together, don't fork the community to support proprietary ownership of standards. It's probably morally wrong as the Free Software people would say and it's probably also a strategic mistake as the pragmatic Open Source people would say.
3) Thank You



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David Pool, MBA

Portland, OR 97232

http://www.news4neighbors.org