Please remember PNG, and do not allow RAND to become policy

To Whom It May Concern:

Many more enlightened arguments have been made in favor of the position I
favor with regards to the RAND policy.

I have little to add except to ask those of you in the W3C to recall that
one of the motivations for the development of the Portable Network Graphics
(PNG) standard which the W3C has supported (and one of the continuing
motivations for its continued use on web pages today) was (and is) to
effectively replace the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) due to concerns
with possible licensing issues in the LZW compression algorithm used in GIF
and patented by Unisys.

I ask that you take note of that as the initiative to make RAND official
policy is pursued, given that RAND would allow similar licensing issues to
become prevalent in the standards released by W3C and thus possibly lead to
the W3C becoming irrelevant and ignored, or fought against and possibly
replaced by something more open and thus more in keeping with the philosophy
of the Internet. It is my belief that in the interest of keeping the W3C a
viable and open organization that RAND should not be allowed to become part
of W3C patent policy.


-- 
/"\ Joanne Rosemary Hunter 
\ / (jrhunter.at@at.menagerie.DOT.tf) {http://menagerie.tf/~jrhunter}
 X <--(ASCII Ribbon Campaign - No HTML Mail or postings!)
/ \ Of course I don't know how interesting any of this really is, 
    but now you've got it in your brain cells so you're stuck with it. 
       -Gary Larson

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 13:48:56 UTC