- From: Tommy Marcus McGuire <mcguire@cs.utexas.edu>
- Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 12:23:35 -0500
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
I wish to make a comment about the recent Patent Policy Framework draft, which I am told could allow W3C members to charge royalty fees for technologies included in web standards. In particular, I object to the inclusion of a "reasonable and non-discriminatory" (RAND) licensing option in the proposed policy. I believe that the exclusive use of a "royalty-free" (RF) licensing model is in the best interests of the Internet community, and that RAND licensing would always necessarily exclude some would-be implementors, especially among open source and free software developers. As a system administrator and researcher at a large university, I routinely use open and free software both as part of my work and to support my users. I have found it to be both technically more advanced and more stable and useful that other options. I applaud the W3C for its tradition of providing open-source reference implementations and its work to promote a wide variety of interoperable implementations of its open standards. As an observer on several IETF working group mailing lists, I recognize how hard that work can be. The W3C can best continue its work of "leading the Web to its full potential" by continuing this tradition, and avoiding restrictive licensing. Tommy McGuire
Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 13:23:36 UTC