Patent Policy

I am writing to express my opposition to RAND.  I will not repeat the 
excellent arguments that Alan Cox made.  He makes them far better than I 
could.  

I will, however, tell you briefly about how it would affect our small 
business.  We work with local governments in the U.S. to help them 
straighten out their street addresses.  Most local governments here can 
only locate roughly 65% of their addresses.  It means, bluntly, that the 
ambulance is late for the other 35%.  

We help fix this problem, and keep it fixed.  It is not glamourous work. 
 It involves tracking down all the ways the people, the data, the 
software and the workflow do not work together, and fixing all of it. 
 Ultimately, however, it saves lives.  

Our ability to operate effectively depends directly on open standards of 
all kinds.  We depend on it for communications, for information, for the 
interoperability that makes our work possible.  Simple, open, free, 
interoperable technologies make it possible for us to make sense of the 
data that comes from the disparate systems we find in each jurisdiction. 
 We had been looking towards the development of SVG and GML (geographic 
markup language) to help us de-balkanize mapped information even further.  

Please remember the importance of things like emergency services when 
you think about RAND.  


Sara Yurman

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 13:46:30 UTC