Opposition to proposed RAND policy

Hi,

I am part of the free software community and I realise that you have a lot of 
submissions to go through, but I would also like to briefly voice my 
opposition to the proposed W3C RAND policy.

My reasons are as follows:

The proposed policy is against the W3C charter as published on the W3C web 
site.

It discriminates against the free software community.

A standard is something that everyone should adhere to and should be patent 
free. Organisations should be able to extend the standard with their own 
patented technology.

Patented technology as a standard encourages corruption within a standards 
body and bias towards particular patent holders. To prevent any form of this 
occuring it should be mandatory that any standard be patent and royalty free.

Regards


Gavin Melhuish
Software Engineer
Sydney Australia

Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2001 05:38:46 UTC