Re: patent policy and unnatural groupings

On Saturday 2013-09-21 07:39 -0700, Larry Masinter wrote:
> The patent policy is harmful to web architecture. Specifications and working groups that should be modularized get lumped together in unnatural ways because putting work in a separate document or a separate committee would allow a key patent-holder to withdraw from their patent commitments.
> 
> Instead we wind up with these "Super working groups" with perpetual charters and lives.

In CSS and Web Apps, having things in a single working group helps
ensure good technical review at the early stages of specification
development (rather than waiting until last call), and the documents
tend to be small and modularized anyway.  So I don't see the harm to
Web architecture of the super-group nature of these groups.

I agree the patent policy has major costs (e.g., in difficulty of
chartering), though.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)