against RAND

World Wide Web Consortium
Patent Policy Working Group
www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org

I'm concerned about the recent Patent Policy Framework draft, which could 
allow W3C members to charge royalty fees for technologies included in web 
standards.  In particular, I object to the inclusion of a "reasonable and 
non-discriminatory" (RAND) licensing option in the proposed policy. I 
believe that the exclusive use of a "royalty-free" (RF) licensing model is 
in the best interests of the Internet community.  RAND licensing would 
always necessarily exclude some would-be implementors, especially among 
open source and free software developers.

I admire the W3C for its tradition of providing open-source reference 
implementations and its work to promote a wide variety of interoperable 
implementations of its open standards. The W3C can best continue its work 
of "leading the Web to its full potential" by continuing this tradition, 
and saying no to RAND licensing.

Sincerely,

Alexander Nakhimovsky   tel 315-228-7586
Computer Science Dpt    fax 315-228-7004
Colgate University   sasha@cs.colgate.edu
Hamilton NY 13346    sasha@mail.colgate.edu
http://csproj.colgate.edu/adn.htm

Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 07:25:58 UTC