RAND is WRONG

Regarding the new policy proposed at http://www.w3.org/TR/patent-policy/
(the publication of which I only just discovered today), I must voice my
strenuous objection.

To my mind, this policy seems antithetical to the principles on which the
web was built, and fatally flawed by a glaring internal contradiction.  Any
standard that subjects would-be adopters to the payment of royalty fees is
by definition a discriminatory standard, in that it discriminates between
those with the money to pay and those without.  In practice, this would put
the developers of free and open-source software at a great disadvantage
versus their commercial counterparts, which would have a chilling effect on
the movement toward a single WorldWideWeb, equally accessible to all the
world's citizens.  This, to me, would seem to be a fundamental betrayal of
the values that the W3C exists to advance;  if W3C were to actually
implement such a policy, then it would cease to be of relevance for many of
us who look to the W3C as the one authoritative source of standards that are
truly open in the www realm.

So, I urge you to rethink this RAND policy, and keep the W3C focus on open
(i.e. free) standards.

Thanks for your attention to this.


|/|/alt
Walter Ludwick
CTO, Walmar (Eastern Canada) Limited

Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 09:09:40 UTC