RAND proprosal

Greetings

As an avid user of the internet, as well as a private webdesigner and
sysadmin for my network, I am writing to encourage the W3C to stop
efforts supporting the royalty-based "standards" which will require
those of us "in the trenches" using these standards to pay for the
usage.

Currently there is quite a fervor that gets raised when the originators
of the Compuserv graphic format GIF decide to go on a crusade against
"illegal use" of what has become a de-facto standard for web graphics.
Most people have migrated their former GIFs to the PNG format now
because of this.

It is my opinion, and I believe it is shared by many developers, that
anything that is set as an "internet standard" should be maintained as
"royalty-free" for use. Imagine if the HTML standards were fee-based;
how many of the advances that we have today would never have happened if
html, active server pages, java server pages, php, perl, and so many
other advances (including such simple things as tables and frames) were
only used based on the payment of a "fee"?

The majority of the companies which are looking to be able to charge
fees for their "standards" are mega-corporations which really don't need
the income other than to line their profits? And yet they are only going
to end up hurting the people they are supposed to be supporting, in the
end -- their customers.

The internet was created as a free environment - free for use, free for
advancement, free to share and create amongst everyone in the world.
Supporting fee-based standards goes against everything which founded it
-- including the same principles which went into the founding of the
World Wide Web and your Consortium.

Standards should be agreed upon by everyone...and standards should be
free. To support anything else would end up creating chaos on the
internet -- people can only do certain things with certain programs, and
will no longer be able to freely share information.

Sincerely,
~Hugh D. Fegely~
-- 
hugh d fegely     wolffe@wolffeden.net || To look into the eyes of
     http://wolffeden.net/Wolffe/      || a wolf.. is to look into
Gnu Privacy Guard    Key ID 0xA59476B4 || the depths of your soul.