- From: Glenn Randers-Pehrson <glennrp@home.com>
- Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 10:04:59 -0400
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Chris Lilley wrote: >Ok, so could you explain how 'nothing at all' is better? I just posted a >'what-if' regarding GIF and what would have happened had GIF been >developed at W3C and had the PPF been in place as policy. The situation >when GIF was actually developed was 'nothing at all' - no agreement from >anyone regarding any license terms, no call for any disclosure of >patents, and thus no legal repercussions for failure to disclose. > >Which resulted in a bunch of open source work ceasing and some shareware >companies going out of business as the license terms eventually imposed >were not RAND or RF. > >Do you agree with this analysis? The analysis is fine, but the final solution is no good. In your hypothetical what-if, instead of rolling over and allowing UniSys to RAND-license GIF, W3C should have decided, "Ok, we can't use LZW compression in GIF, because it is a public standard. Let's find a workaround." GIF would have ended up being RF, with the DEFLATE compression instead of LZW. Glenn (IANAL)
Received on Thursday, 4 October 2001 10:07:47 UTC