W3C Patent Policy Comment

Dear W3C Members,

as an 'Internet citizen' and WWW user I would like
to ask you to reject the patent policy as described in the working draft.
I believe this policy is an extremely bad idea from the point of view
of future web development.
W3C has the potential to use its standarization process to make web
standards truly open and available to anyone creating either free or proprietary
solutions for future Internet.
Allowing patented solutions in in W3C recommendations may in short term
increase your potential to standarize; but in the long term it will
certainly cause many serious problems and hinder the use of W3C recommended
standards by the Internet community, substantially decreasing their
significance.
We have seen other standard bodies go the way of standarizing patented
technologies, and it seems to only decrease standarization level in their
areas of interest.
Please keep the Internet (and WWW as a part of it) as fully standarized and
open as possible.

Sincerely,
Michal Politowski

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 17:57:08 UTC