Deeply concerned about the possible change of accepted IPR policy

  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