my comments on the Patent Policy for WWW Standards

Dear W3C Patent Policy Working Group:

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, and that RAND
licensing would always necessarily exclude some would-be implementors,
especially among open source and free software developers.

I applaud 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,

Dieter Van Uytvanck
Rozenhof 15
B-9920 Lovendegem
Belgium

-- 
Sent by dieter running Linux 2.4.3-20mdk on an i686
6:37pm  up 17 min,  3 users,  load average: 0.24, 0.21, 0.19
PGP-key: http://gallery.uunet.be/dietvu/dieter.pgp

Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 12:39:16 UTC