A plot to destroy W3C

I see this proposed change of W3C policy on patents as a plot by some of 
it's commercial members to make the organization irrelevant. It is 
obvious that any royality incurring "standard" will be ignored if not 
boycotted by the Open Source society. This will undermine any relevance 
W3C may have today which is mostly in the Open Source community (check 
the Web pages of W3C's corporate members with the W3C HTML validator to 
see how much they care about the standards).

The resulting balcanisation of Internet standards may be a good pretext 
for some corporations to "embrace and extend" the W3C standards giving 
the dominant players full power of inserting whatever proprietary 
"intellectual property" they want into their software.

I believe W3C has now a good opportunity to save the Web standards by 
rejecting this ploy. The RAND proposition should not be adopted not only 
for the general public good but also in order to save W3C itself.

Regards,

Jacek Piskozub

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2001 21:10:37 UTC