W3C Patent Policy: Comment on last call draft

Hi,

It is with great sadness that I learned that the Patent Policy Working
Group's Royalty-Free Patent Policy Working Draft of 14 November 2002
still includes the possibility for patent holders to limit their "RF"
patent license to implementations of the standard (section three, item
3 of list).

I'm worried that this will make it impossible to implement W3C
standards based on such patents in free (as in freedom) software: Any
software implementing the standard would not be truly free, as the
portion of code implementing the patent can not be reused in another
context. Free software is essential to the development of the
Internet, it is essential to computing that respects its user's
rights.


It is still time to fix this. I therefor urge the W3C Patent Policy
Working Group not to allow restrictions in scope / "field of use" in
the patents covering part of its standards.

-- 
Lionel