- From: Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 12:57:53 -0500
- To: Duncan Bayne <dhgbayne@fastmail.fm>, public-restrictedmedia@w3.org
On 11/18/2013 7:39 PM, Duncan Bayne wrote: >> 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: I wasn't there at the time, so maybe you are right that W3C reversed itself. I can't tell if you are right from the articles you referenced. The October 1 article talks about a proposal to W3C but it doesn't say that this was ever endorsed by W3C. The February 26 article merely says that the Oct 1 proposal was rejected. > > ==== > 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? >
Received on Tuesday, 19 November 2013 17:58:00 UTC