RAND: hat about everyone else?

OK, other than the corporations that will use the extremely *foolish*
RAND licensing model for the sole sake of raking in more money than
they've earned, what about the people that have to pay those most likely
exhorbitant costs?

RAND licensing should either only apply to corporations seeking profit
(thus they'd have money to pay the patent holders), or even better only
apply to application/code-libraries that are distributed under a
non-open source license (be that a license from the Open Source
Foundation or a seperate W3C open source license list).  This would give
a sort of "GPL-ish" effect to the royalty-free license - only completely
"open source" ( not just GPL compatible ) applications and libraries are
exempt from royalties.  Any application or library that is linked with
any non-open source license renders the entire application suitable for
requiring royalty-fees for use.  The royalty fees could apply to the
user (their payments could be part of purchase of product through the
company) so that an open source application linked with a non-open
source license by the end user would legally require a royalty fee if
the patent hodler wishes one.  In this method, those capable of paying a
royalty fee (any user or organization that has a transfer of money in
return for the software) can pay, while those who cannot (i.e. all true
open source software) do not have to.

If a corporation isn't OK with that, then they shouldn't be helping to
make "open" standards that conflict with their licenses!  If you wanted
to ban guns you wouldn't make bullets, would you?  Please, for the sake
of common sense if nothing else, don't pass this extremely foolish
proposal.  If a corporation can't contribute their patent rights or
agree to a royalty-free license, then it should be considered a
proprietary standard and not an open web standard.

Thank you. I hope you make the intelligent choice.

Sean Middleditch
 of
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 04:38:30 UTC