- From: Joe Votour <vulture@vulturesnest.net>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 12:29:42 -0700
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org (www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org)
Dear Sirs/Madams: I have read the W3C's FAQ on the proposed new patent policy, and I must say that I am shocked. What happened to ensuring a World Wide Web based on open standards promoting interoperability? By allowing patented technologies to be part of an open standard, the W3C committee is putting the World Wide Web in the hands of those who can pay the most. If you can't afford to pay the royalty and licensing fees for the technologies which are part of the standard, then your client or server may not incorporate them. This would effectively kill non-commercial (i.e. Open Source) programs that cannot afford the necessary fees to make their programs W3C compliant. Currently I use three browsers to "surf the internet" - Konqueror, Mozilla and Internet Explorer, all of them reasonably W3C compliant to varying degrees. I use the browser that suits my purposes at the time, however under this new policy, Konqueror and Mozilla probably won't be able to remain W3C compliant, as the groups that created those browsers do not have the finances to pay royalty fees. I also can't help but notice that all of the companies on this proposal are rather large companies, and also happen to have their own agendas. Microsoft, for example, would love to patent key technologies on the WWW that only Internet Explorer can use. They've already patented their ASF video codec, and threatened one person who reverse engineered it with a lawsuit, thus ensuring that only Microsoft software may use it. Is this the future that the W3C really wants? I can't seriously believe that any smaller companies (noticably absent from the proposal) would really consent to this. I would have hoped that we all would have learned from such things as the Unisys GIF and Rambus litigations, and would have thought this through more clearly. It seems that such has not happened. As an amateur web master, I adhere to the W3C standards by the letter, running all of my HTML code through the W3C validators to ensure compatibility with W3C compliant browsers. Under this proposal, W3C compliancy is now reduced to a sham, as there will most likely be only one W3C compliant browser. Thank you for your time, and I really hope that you will please reconsider this move. Yours truly, Joe Votour
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 15:29:36 UTC