- From: Daniel Veillard <daniel@veillard.com>
- Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 00:33:40 +0200
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org, timbl@w3.org
- Cc: djweitzner@w3.org, daly@w3.org
Let's face it, the success of most W3C Recommendation was in a large part due to the fact that a lot of people could implement them. We have heard in the past the number of voices being raised against complexity of standard, which could possibly break this recipe for success. If implementating Recommendation cannot be guaranteed to be royaltee free, the same patent game present in other standard bodies will start to apply here too. I do think that making XPointer and SMIL-2.0 garanteed royalty free standard (or possible future standard) were huge improvement to gain acceptance of those specifications. If we can't get this guarantee large members like IBM and Sun will not step back in the future and will be in a position to argue against according royaltee free use of patented techonologies (and we know W3C does not have the resources to debunk even blatantly unfair patents). In practice this would: - slow down the work of Working Groups who will have to discuss those problem to no end to try to avoid patented "areas" - make the rules of the game for participating in Working Group far less clear, we won't be able to trust other members when they suggest a given technical suggestion - harm the deployement of the specifications subject to such royaltee - break an established rule of trust between the W3C and the web community at large. I strongly recoment the Director stay firm keeping the principles of what made W3C and the Web a succes and refuses to change the rules to get a specification to access Recommendation status, disalowing any specification which would not be guaranteed to be implementable royaltee free. The Director should also provide directions now to the Patent Policy working Group to change directions quickly and provide as fast as possible public feedback that it will keep the rule of trust between the W3C and the web community. Not doing so would make a lot of harm to W3C public image, very fast, I hope to see some public announcement fast on this, this is really important, thanks, Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Network http://redhat.com/products/network/ veillard@redhat.com | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 18:33:52 UTC