opposed to RAND

I wish to express my opposition to any change in W3C liscensing which
would involve the imposition of royalties upon world wide web
standards.  The legitimizing of such royalties would seriously impeded
the development of open source software development in areas involving
the web.  A casual examination of the persons submitting these requests
for liscencing changes suggests that these changes are being proposed by
corporations (Microsoft, Apple Computers, Hewlett-Packard, Phillips) to
undermine the expansion of open source software into web applications.
The involvement of royalties in such standards inherently discriminates
against open source applications, regardless of the claims of those
submitting the proposed changes.

Eric Hawk
Physics Department
Colorado School of Mines
Golden, CO 80401
ehawk@mines.edu
phone: 303-273-3896