Comments on proposed patent policy

I have been a participant in ANSI and ISO standards committees
for the past ten years (X3H4, X3T2, NCITS L8, and ISO SC32WG2).

All of the standards that I have worked on have been
available for any company or individual to use without any
payment of royalties.  I strongly believe that any attempt to
require payment of royalties is highly counterproductive.

The net effect of making a standard that requires payment of
royalties is to cause people to design "work arounds" that
avoid the proprietary features and thereby create incompatible
implementations.

If the W3C begins to develop standards that require payment
of royalties, their proposals will simply be ignored.

Sincerely,

John F. Sowa

Web site:  http://www.jfsowa.com

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 23:05:55 UTC