Re: Patents to be Auctioned

Hi Dudley,

Dudley Mills wrote:
> ... the patents anticipated key aspects of the Semantic Web.

I sincerely hope you're not going to put this community in the position 
of having to burn time, effort and money proving the lengthy and well 
known heritage that lead to what we've lately called the "Semantic Web". 
As most people in this community know, the design of the Semantic Web 
has been part of the Web project throughout it's history, while drawing 
on work that long precedes the Web itself.

> I wrote and filed those patents because I wanted something like the 
> Sematic Web to evolve sooner rather than later. The patents mouldered 
> for 10 years until I was approached recently by Ocean Tomo 
> (http://www.oceantomo.com/index.html) who offered to auction them 
> (http://www.oceantomoauctions.com/OTA_Catalogue_Lot.asp?eventid=42008&Lot=16 
> <http://www.oceantomoauctions.com/OTA_Catalogue_Lot.asp?eventid=42008&Lot=16>).
>  
> 
> Who gets to own the patents is now out of my hands. However, I’d like 
> them to go to a good home if I can find one.

Those two statements don't fit very well together.

Your messages to this list give a general impression unfortunately close 
to "hey, SemWeb believers ... make sure you're the highest bidder, in 
case this material (which underpins your work) falls into less-good 
hands". This is I hope far from your intent, but I hope you can 
understand that the community might naturally interpret your initiative 
that way. Consequently, I'd be grateful if you could refrain from using 
this list to advertise your patent auction.

And to other list members, I repeat my advise from 2002 on 
www-rdf-interest ([1]): let's find other topics to talk about.

We should close this topic immediately. Those who wish to continue it 
know each other's email addresses and can find other fora.

Many thanks,

Dan

SW Interest Group chair


[1]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2002Jan/0076.html

-- 
http://danbri.org/

Received on Saturday, 19 January 2008 12:34:07 UTC