- From: Samuel Taylor <sam.taylor@anu.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 11:45:39 +1000
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to urge you to rethink the highly questionable RAND licencing scheme that you are proposing for use in some future W3C standards. I appreciate that software patents present a range of problems to a standards body such as the W3C. The two goals stated in section 1 of your 2 October public statement are both fair and reasonable. However, the solution you have arrived at is ill-considered, unpopular and I believe ultimately unworkable. More than that, I think it will serve to marginalise the W3C and render irrelevant the standards it produces. Neither the general internet or the web were created because a standards organisation deemed that they should be. Nor where they the product of a large multinational corporation. Both exist today because of mass user support and the availability of free technology. Even today there are no significant web technologies that require users to pay for them. The most successful technologies remain the non-proprietory, open and free ones. To ignore this simple fact is to make a grave mistake. Public opinion is vital to the survival of any standards body. The details of the RAND scheme, and the less than open way in which it has been applied to standards such as SVG, has served to anger many IT professionals, software developers and general users. RAND smacks of collusion and vested interest and serves only to tarnish the reputation of the W3C. You have diminished yourselves in the eyes of many. The strength of public reaction speaks for itself. Find another way to address the patent problem: well all expected better of the W3C that this. -- ______________________________________________________________ Samuel R. A. Taylor Department of Computer Science, Australian National University phone: +61 2 6125 8176 fax: +61 2 6125 0010 web: http://acsys.anu.edu.au/~sam
Received on Wednesday, 3 October 2001 21:43:05 UTC