Next steps in W3C Patent Policy process

To all who provided comments on the W3C draft Patent Policy:

First, thank you for taking the time to express your concern about this
issue. We have received many substantive and constructive comments. These
comments will, I am certain, make significant contributions to the final
policy that W3C adopts.

Second, here's some information about how the process of developing this
policy will proceed in light of your input and how you can continue to be
involved. We are modifying the Patent Policy WG process to improve
communication between the open source and independent developer community
and W3C:

+Open Source experts invited to join the Working Group: Eben Moglen (General
Counsel, Free Software Foundation) [1] and Bruce Perens (Co-Founder of the
Open Source Initiative) [2] are joining the Patent Policy Working Group as
'invited experts.' They will participate equally with the W3C Members in the
group and will share completely in the decision-making and
consensus-building process. I welcome both their expertise, as well their
ability to promote dialogue with the Web and Open Source communities.

+Second Last Call for public comment before finalizing policy: W3C will not
finalize this policy before we put out another public draft for comment.

+Public Homepage for the Working Group:[3] We've created a
publicly-accessible home page that points to all public documents and public
mailing lists associated with the Patent Policy WG. We hope this will make
it easier for people who are interested to follow the progress of the group.

+Public summaries of working group meetings and conference calls: After each
meeting of the Working Group, we will circulate a public summary of the
issues discussed.

+Public Mailing list: The mailing list www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org will
remain active as a forum in which to discuss the policy as it develops. We
will post all public materials generated by the WG to this list.

+Participation in public forums: As Chair of the WG, I am seeking
opportunities to appear in as many public forums as possible, both online
and in person, to discuss these issues. I'll be doing a Slashdot
interview[4] and appearing at a Town Hall on Patent Policy at XML 2001.[5]
I'm open to other offers as well.

+Regular publication of public working drafts: The WG will publish an update
on our work at least every three months, generally in the form of a new
Public Working Drafts. I would expect to put out the next public draft by
the end of October.

Finally, we have a huge (2200+) number of public comments to respond to. We
are preparing a summary of the comments that the Working Group will
evaluate. As promised in the first Last Call draft, we will respond to each
issue (though not each individual email) raised.

So, please stay tuned. I look forward to your comments on the next draft of
the policy.

Danny Weitzner
Chair, W3C Patent Policy Working Group

Links:
[1] http://moglen.law.columbia.edu
[2] http://www.perens.org/Articles/Bio.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/ppwg/
[4] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/08/1459240&mode=thread
[5] http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/

Received on Friday, 12 October 2001 18:28:12 UTC