Appalling

This is a serious issue which merits considerably more than
a two-week comment period.

This is the move Microsoft presaged in the Halloween Papers,
to close standards, and your are playing directly into their
hands.

Your success and the success of your outputs has been the
result of the freedom of anarchic distribution and
implementation.

You will be marginalised as a rich companies club, like all
the rest (excluding the IETF, who will become the core of
developments you currently hold).

Patent is death to innovation and we, users, will not accept
it from you, despite your excellent past record, or any one
else.

Hamish MacEwan
F10/28 Clifton Terrace
Lambton
New Zealand.  

-- 
We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive
qualities we possess, but we excel in those which can also
make use of our defects.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 02:58:11 UTC