RAND proposal

To whom it may concern:

As a very busy trainer and consultant who sees half-a-dozen different
clients per month for WWW training purposes, I have always used your
site as a prime reference.
Reason?
It is authoritative, vendor-neutral and fee-free.

Your proposed licensing scheme will kill this stone dead. (You will no
longer be a fee-free site.) The result will be that I will stop using
your site, and use one of the Free / Open Software clones that will
inevitably spring up, instead. (Think mySQL here.)  Eventually (and
fairly rapidly, too), the W3C will lose its authoritative character,
because the 50-odd companies I push towards you per year, *and* their
employees, will no longer consider you as useful.

Multiply this by *all* the other consultants / trainers / schools /
colleges / universities who are your current clients, and you can see
how quickly and how far the damage will escalate.

A re-think is most definitely needed on your part.

Why don't you put it out to your clients -- openly -- on the web. Ask
*us* to help you come up with a solution?
We each need the other -- co-operation, not conflict is the way ahead in
this field.

A bon entendeur, salut.

Martin Wheeler
GLASTONBURY
England
mwheeler@startext.co.uk
http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
mwheeler@avalonix.co.uk                       http://www.avalonix.co.uk/

--
              *** Free Speech *** Free Dmitry Sklyarov ***
   Sell your shares in Adobe.  Abjure all American non-free software.
    Help prevent Europe from following American corporate dictates:
http://uk.eurorights.org/                       http://freesklyarov.org/

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 14:57:28 UTC