Patent Policies...

Dear Patent Policy Working Group,

As a web developer and administrator of an academic network, I
strongly object to the portion of the Patent Policy Framework draft
which deals with "reasonable and non-discriminatory" (RAND) licensing
of WWW technologies.

One of the major factors in the explosive growth of the WWW has been
the open and royalty-free access to the underlying protocols and
technologies.  I applaud the W3C for historically providing
open-source reference implementations and promoting a wide variety of
interoperable implementations of its open standards.  Changing that
tradition to allow encumbered web standards would only exclude most
academic, small-business, and open-source web developers and result in
the WWW being even more a haven for large corporations instead of the
envisioned "information superhighway" where everyone has a chance to
be seen and heard.  It would be one more step towards making the web
just another glossy advertising brochure.

I believe that the exclusive use of a "royalty-free" licensing model
is in the best interests of the Internet community, and would help
keep the Work Wide Web accessible to all, especially open source,
academic, and free software developers.

-- 
Brian Powell    <bpowell@osc.edu>    http://www.osc.edu/~bpowell/
     Senior Systems Manager, The Ohio Supercomputer Center
Phone: 614-292-6017               PGP public key at the above URL

Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 10:20:29 UTC