license fees will never be non-discriminatory

please consider that a "reasonable and non-discriminatory" license IS
discriminating as soon as it is asking for fees to be paid, for some
people/organizations willing to implement a standard will not have the resources to pay
those fees.
the w3c recommendations and specifications have been of great value to the
web community, being the only standard that could be used by anyone and
expected to work with all major software products of any company or open source
project.
if the w3c starts promoting "standards" which are not freely availabe and
implementable by anyone, those "standards" do not deserve to be called so
anymore and the w3c itself would lose the acceptance it has had in the community.
the consequence would probably be many organizations fighting for acceptance
of their standards and as a result a major confusion and probably also a
slowdown of innovation.
since this cannot be the goal of the w3c i hope you will reconsider your
position towards so-called RAND licenses.

bjoern andreas lemburg

-- 
GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet.
http://www.gmx.net

Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2001 20:15:58 UTC