RAND license and the future of the web

Hello,

I've read about the threat to open/free software that the W3 Consortium is 
planning to make. I find it strange that perhaps the organization that was
generating more "open" useful technologies is suddenly going to change 
this and start working as a real company.

If standards are recommended which include patents for which royalty fees 
have to be paid, then the web will loose many projects like Konqueror, 
Mozilla, Lynx, etc which will get unusable once they cannot be used to 
navigate through the internet, making unusable also many UNIX operating 
systems.

I won't try to be extensive because you're going to get many mails about 
this issue, but I'd like to say something: just think what the web would 
be right now if the html standard included a patent and everyone wanting 
to write an html page had to pay to the patent holder. This isn't the 
future I want and probably isn't the future you want neither.

Greetings,

--
Antonio Larrosa Jimenez
KDE Core developer  - larrosa@kde.org
http://perso.wanadoo.es/antlarr
KDE - The development framework of the future, today.

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 14:30:55 UTC