- From: Brian Powell <bpowell@osc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 22:19:27 -0400 (EDT)
- To: <www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org>
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