Regarding the Patent Policy

Hi!

I think you should think about the Role the X Consortium had: they too
changed from a free system to something requiring fees. They had a hard
time with their decision and ultimately changed back. For such backbone
techiniques like the Web there is absolutely no reason to go any way
that is not free. Implementing "standards" that require license fees
will just demolish those "standards" just before they even can become
real standards - a large body of software on the Web is free software
and those won't support non-free alternatives. We don't need another GIF
debacle.

Actually I think that the W3C should take another route and enforce Free
Software Guidlines compliant licenses on all techniques that are used
for their standards. This would ensure a maximum base of
implementations, which is always a good thing.

bye, Georg Bauer

Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 07:15:46 UTC