RAND Licensing

Dear Sirs and Ladies,

it was brought to my attention, that the W3C is in the process to integrate patented methods and/or technologies into the W3C recomendations.

This could be a cause to stop all development related to W3C recomendations at our company.

We are in the process of implementing Internet and WWW based technologies into our workflow, i.e. EDI over XML, which we would have to stop imediately if there was any concern over third party rights to any standard which we have to use for interoperabiltiy between our and our Customers Systems.

We are a small logistics Company with 950 employees mostly in Germany, Belgique, Netherlands, France, Spain, Brasil, PR China and USA. We have a turnaround of roughly 500.000.000 mio Euro and our Customers include Companies like DaimlerChrysler and GM.

To stay interoperable and competitive, we use Open Source Software under various licenses including, but not limited to, GPL, BSD and Artistic. This would be rendered impossible by the proposed RAND Licensing.


Regards

Volker Hett

Stute Verkehrs-GmbH
Hans Böckler Str. 48
D-28217 Bremen
Germany

Fon.: +49 421 3862-324
Fax: +49 421 3862-292
e-Mail: volker.hett@stute.de
http://www.stute.de