- From: Brian Powell <bpowell@osc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 22:19:27 -0400 (EDT)
- To: <www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org>
Dear Patent Policy Working Group,
As a web developer and administrator of an academic network, I
strongly object to the portion of the Patent Policy Framework draft
which deals with "reasonable and non-discriminatory" (RAND) licensing
of WWW technologies.
One of the major factors in the explosive growth of the WWW has been
the open and royalty-free access to the underlying protocols and
technologies. I applaud the W3C for historically providing
open-source reference implementations and promoting a wide variety of
interoperable implementations of its open standards. Changing that
tradition to allow encumbered web standards would only exclude most
academic, small-business, and open-source web developers and result in
the WWW being even more a haven for large corporations instead of the
envisioned "information superhighway" where everyone has a chance to
be seen and heard. It would be one more step towards making the web
just another glossy advertising brochure.
I believe that the exclusive use of a "royalty-free" licensing model
is in the best interests of the Internet community, and would help
keep the Work Wide Web accessible to all, especially open source,
academic, and free software developers.
--
Brian Powell <bpowell@osc.edu> http://www.osc.edu/~bpowell/
Senior Systems Manager, The Ohio Supercomputer Center
Phone: 614-292-6017 PGP public key at the above URL
Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 10:20:29 UTC