No RAND, please!

Patents will be the bane of 2 categories of software:

 * Open Source and Free Software (from the GNU definition of Free)
 * Small companies software, that cannot cough up the enormous patent 
licensing prices.

As such, forget about Konqueror (current CSS2 conformance leader), forget 
about Opera (current user-interface leader), forget about OmniWeb, forget 
about just about the network desktop that KDE and GNOME are trying to provide 
for UNIX, forget about just about that has built the web. Sendmail, BIND, 
Apache, UNIX. All built the web you are using today. All without patents. Not 
a single of those could have coughed up the patent licensing fees.

For if the web had had patents, there'd be no web.

-- 
Christian Lavoie
clavoie@bmed.mcgill.ca

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 09:23:42 UTC