- From: Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>
- Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 02:52:40 -0400 (EDT)
- To: <www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org>
Hello! Let me introduce myself. I'm Pavel Roskin, maintainer of GNU Midnight Commander and contributor to other GNU projects. GNU is an effort by Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/) to create an operating system that everybody is free to use and improve. I'm very concerned that W3C is considering a possibility to include patented technology in the future web standards. Although the proposal stipulates that only "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patents will be accepted, the fact is that any patent is "discriminatory" towards free software. A patent, by definition, restricts use of the patented technology. Free Software, on the other hand, does not allow any restriction on how it is used. Therefore, every software patent is incompatible with Free Software and thus "discriminatory". Considering the role that free software played in the history of World Wide Web it seems very ungrateful to discriminate against it. I'm not against patents. They are useful to promote research and creativity. However, patents don't cost nothing to the society. Restricting the use of patented technology may stimulate new ideas, but the patent royalties do prevent some people from using already existing ideas. Patent law is a balance between helping the creator and restricting the followers. In the countries that acknowledge software patents, the patent law is actually biased to the benefit of "creators", who are often the companies with few engineers and many lawyers to sue everybody who doesn't want to pay royalties for trivial ideas. There is no need for W3C to disbalance the system even further. Another problem with patented technologies is that they cannot be developed without participation of the patent holder. What happens if the patent holder doesn't want to improve the technology? What if the patented technology has security holes by design and the patent holder refuses to fix them? What if the patent holder is forced to change the terms of the patent so the they are not "reasonable and non-discriminatory"? Can you actually withdraw a standard already implemented in many products? I don't think so. Imagine that somebody forces you to withdraw e.g. Cascading Style Sheets because of patent problems. Not only would everybody make fun of you, but W3C would become irrelevant after that. If W3C is to survive and to remain relevant, it should require any patent rights to be surrendered unconditionally on the prospective web standards. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin
Received on Thursday, 4 October 2001 02:52:04 UTC