Patents and standards

I'm a strong advocate of standards in my organization. However, I cannot
support a standard mandates the use of patented technology because that
would preclude the use availability of open source implementations of the
given standard.

All standards worthy of becoming broadly accepted standards MUST allow
open source implementations. Otherwise we return to the pre-internet era
of proprietary networks that could not talk to each other, even though
each type of network was indeed an standard, though each standard was
promulgated by a company.

If w3c provides standards that preclude the use of open source
implementations, other competing standards are likely to bu put forth in
other standards bodies and w3c will simply loose credibility.

Randy Wright