- From: Simon Brooke <simon@beesianum.jasmine.org.uk>
- Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 17:58:19 +0100
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Like Alan Cox I am deeply disappointed that this issue is even being discussed. It clearly violates the whole spirit and principle of the Web, and seeks to exclude the very people who have made the Web a success. Who do you propose is going to pay the 'reasonable and non discriminatory' licence fees on behalf of, for example, the Apache Foundation, custodians of the world's most popular Web server (indeed, of the server that serves W3C's own website)? Who is going to pay on behalf of the Konqueror browser? The PHP scripting language? PERL? The Web is built on open source code. But the open source projects are not members of W3C because membership costs a minimum of US$5,000 per annum and most open source projects have no money at all. This smells very strongly of the technology companies who make up the majority of the membership of W3C seeking to eliminate competition with which they could not otherwise compete. Frankly, whatever the motivations behind this proposal, however honest and well intentioned they were, it will not and cannot be perceived by the Web community as anything but deeply corrupt: an absolute rejection of the principles on which thec Web was built and of the community whose resources and energy W3C has been happy to use. To quote Tim Berners-Lee: "Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." [in Technology Review, July 1996] This proposal is essentially to divide the Web into two: a closed proprietary web best viewed with those commercial tools which have payed the 'reasonable and non discriminatory' fees, and the World Wide Web, no longer guided by W3C and necessarily separate. -- Simon Brooke :: scaffie ltd :: http://www.scaffie.co.uk/ +441556640181 :: what's fresh? :: http://www.scaffie.com/
Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2001 12:58:55 UTC