Re: The Web may be the last bastion of software freedom

> I'm not sure what you think we rejected after an uproar from the 
> community.  W3C was the first to reject patent encumbered technology and 
> did it under the direction of Tim Berners-Lee.

I've retyped this sentence four times now, with each revision becoming
progressively more polite.  In entirely polite form: your statement is
true, Jeff, but omits much.  

This is how the rest of the world saw the W3Cs actions at the time:

====
http://web.archive.org/web/20020307130318/http://news.com.com/2100-1023-845023.html

...

The World Wide Web Consortium works with developers, software makers and
others to come up with standards for the Web. Generally those standards
either use publicly available technology or get the agreement of patent
holders not to enforce their patents.

But in a controversial proposal made public last fall, the consortium
debated whether to allow companies to charge royalty fees if their
technologies are used in a standard.

That proposal met with a firestorm of criticism, particularly from
devotees of the open-source and free software movements. In a reference
draft being published Tuesday, the W3C has moved back to the "royalty
free" standard.

...
=====

"Firestorm of criticism" is how I remember it too.  Do you not see that
the same pattern is repeating now, in 2013, with DRM?

-- 
Duncan Bayne
ph: +61 420817082 | web: http://duncan-bayne.github.com/ | skype:
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Received on Tuesday, 19 November 2013 00:39:33 UTC