- From: Walt Ludwick <wludwick@mail.walmar.com>
- Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 14:09:33 +0100
- To: <www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org>
Regarding the new policy proposed at http://www.w3.org/TR/patent-policy/ (the publication of which I only just discovered today), I must voice my strenuous objection. To my mind, this policy seems antithetical to the principles on which the web was built, and fatally flawed by a glaring internal contradiction. Any standard that subjects would-be adopters to the payment of royalty fees is by definition a discriminatory standard, in that it discriminates between those with the money to pay and those without. In practice, this would put the developers of free and open-source software at a great disadvantage versus their commercial counterparts, which would have a chilling effect on the movement toward a single WorldWideWeb, equally accessible to all the world's citizens. This, to me, would seem to be a fundamental betrayal of the values that the W3C exists to advance; if W3C were to actually implement such a policy, then it would cease to be of relevance for many of us who look to the W3C as the one authoritative source of standards that are truly open in the www realm. So, I urge you to rethink this RAND policy, and keep the W3C focus on open (i.e. free) standards. Thanks for your attention to this. |/|/alt Walter Ludwick CTO, Walmar (Eastern Canada) Limited
Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 09:09:40 UTC