- From: Andreas Huennebeck <ah@bruker.de>
- Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 12:01:50 +0200 (MESZ)
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
Dear Sirs, the W3C currently discusses about the idea to incorporate patented technologies in W3C standards, if the holder licenses the patents for a reasonable and non-discriminatory fee. Well, in my opinion this is a very bad idea. The internet and the Web blossomed because no patented standards were used, because everybody could afford to put documents worldwide available and get documents as well without the need to pay license fees. The only reason for a patent lies in making money (by selling licenses) or by preventing other parties from using the patented technology (by refusing to sell licenses). Especially open source and free software would suffer from this - exactly that kind of software which created the Internet and the Web in the first place. Do you really think the Web would have had that great success if for example HTML had been a patented standard? Until now the W3C did a good job by promoting royalty-free standards to support interoperability in the Web. It must stay so, because otherwise either the success of the Web is no longer guaranteed, or any proposed standard which is not royalty free will eventually fail to be used at all. Think of the GIF image format patended by Unisys - due to the very late try of Unisys to reap money from patent violaters after it became used as kind of a standard the response was to abandon GIF and switch to other royalty free standards like JPG or PNG. This did help neither Unisys, which received no license fee payment, nor the rest of the Web, where much additional work had to be done. The W3C must reject the RAND proposal; every proposed standard must either be not patented at all or the patent holder must grant a royalty-free license to everybody. Sincerely Yours Andreas Huennebeck, professional Software-Developer, Germany -- Andreas Huennebeck | email: andreas@huennebeck-online.de (KEINE WERBUNG) ----- privat ----- | www : http://www.huennebeck-online.de Fax/Anrufbeantworter: 0721/151-284301 o. 0180/50525-5232659 (24 Pfg/Min) SMS: D1=72617 D2=0172/7366-042 E-Plus=0177/7934-396 Viag=0179/2029-894
Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 06:03:48 UTC