[www-patentpolicy-comment] <none>

I am writing in regards to the W3C "Royalty-free" patent policy proposal.
I believe that, even though this proposal does carry positive ideas in it,
there is a major drawback that, if approved, will cause harm to the use
and development of the free software (as defined by Richard M. Stallman
and the GNU project; please see http://www.fsf.org/ for details) and
eventually will impede competition and innovation.

I am urging you to read the address recently made by the Free Software
Foundation at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html on this issue
and believe that the proposal should be enhanced to fully reflect the
viewpoint of this charity.


Regards,

Nickolai Dobrynin
Dept. of EE/CS
University of WI-Milwaukee
USA