- From: Adrian Tymes <atymes@findlaw.com>
- Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 11:38:24 -0700
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
I respectfully submit that it is, in most cases, simply impossible to have a "non-discriminatory" licensing scheme for software patents that charge any amount of money. My reasoning is as follows: * If a license charges a fixed fee per user (or copy, or site, or whatever), this necessarily discriminates against free software: software can not be free by definition if its users must pay to use it. * If a license has an exemption for free software, this is discriminatory against non-free software, again by definition. In addition, certain commercial interests could "seperate" their software into two pieces that will not work without each other, where one (freely available) contains the licensed part and the other (which must be purchased or leased) does not, thus subverting the entire intent of the license (and possibly forcing a reversion to "fixed fee per user" if the patent holder is to get any money, thus forcing the patented invention out of free software). * If a license charges a percent of sales or similar, so as to apply the same definition to everyone but in effect remain free for free software, its practical effect is as per the second case. In addition, platform vendors such as Microsoft will be even harder pressed to come up with non-discriminatory licenses, other than "free for everyone". No matter what they charge, their own developers will be able to come up with products that use the license essentially for free (their developers' licensing fees are but account shuffling within Microsoft), whereas everyone else will have to pay the license fees out of pocket, most likely passing these costs on to their own customers. Therefore, allowing "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing will have the practical effect of W3C standards being subject to discriminatory licenses, and perhaps unreasonable as well: if perfect compliance is impossible, then compliance beyond lip service may seem to be an unnecessary waste of resources (and falsely perceived as a loss of income, ignoring - as many companies seem to do - the fact that reasonable licenses will be more widely purchased licenses). This will make said standards of less value to developers, possibly to the point where they become largely ignored. These developers will then take less interest in refining the "broken" processes, leading to the W3C's eventual irrelevance. I, and many others, would prefer that this not happen.
Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 14:39:39 UTC