Uselicensing in W3C standards from Mike McCune on 2001-10-11 (www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org from October 2001)

From: Mike McCune <michaelmccune@home.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 09:15:13 -0400
To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Message-ID: <20011011091513.A18743@home.com>

I am very disturbed by the consideration of using RAND technologies in ANY
standards. Quite simply, the Internet was popularized because of open, 
unencumbered standards. Adding patent restrictions would restrict the
standard to commercial software, since most open source and free software 
licenses would forbid the use of RAND technologies in their products.

I am not against using patented technologies on the Web. Any product is free 
to use them but let's not force them on people by making them part of the 
standards. Even today, the most popular Internet server products such as 
Apache, Sendmail, BIND and Linux would not be able to use patented technologies. 

I hope that any standards body rejects restricted technologies and makes the 
standard truely open to all.

Received on Thursday, 11 October 2001 19:43:22 UTC