- From: Erik Sigra <sigra@home.se>
- Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 12:02:54 +0200
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
How can you say that something that is patented can be "Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory"? You seem to forget that patents are constructed to discriminate. I use only Free Software for web related tasks. Other software is irrelevant to me because I can't verify it, fix bugs and adapt it to my needs. Many people have expressed worries that your "RAND" system would not work with the GNU General Public License, which I prefer, and other Free Software licenses. And I consider anything that is incompatible with Free Software to be useless or even harmful. Free Software is based on the principles of sharing and selflessnes that our western civilization is based on. The internet as we have it today is based on Free Software. How will Free web browsers like Konqueror, Mozilla and Lynx be able to implement the W3C standards if "RAND" is accepted? If this is not possible, you can't possibly call it "Reasonable". Do you want big corporations to be able to monopolize the browser market by patenting a technology, making it a W3 standard, charge an amount that others can't afford and implement the standard in their own browser? As you have defined Non-Discriminatory it means that everyone is charged equally for the use of the patented technology. But it doesn't matter how much a corporation charges itself. They could afford any amount of money, but of course their competitors can't.
Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2001 06:00:55 UTC