Re: Comment on proposed patent policy change

On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 04:23:48PM +0200, Peter Toft wrote:
> I understand that the W3C is discussing whether
> patented techniques should be allowed into standards
> made by the W3C;
> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-09-30-001-20-NW-CY
> 
> As chairman of the Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group with
> approximately 6000 members I will strongly ask you to
> reject using patents as basis of any W3C standard. The
> success of the W3C standards have always been that
> anyone could implement compliant software as well as
> hardware based products without facing risks of patent
> infringement. Accepting patent for standards will
> clearly weaken the faith we all have to the W3C.

As the President of the French-Speaking Linux and Free Software
Users Association (AFUL, http://www.aful.org/), I can only support
Peter's reply to your RFC.

I was personnally very suprised, and even shocked, when I read the proposed
policy, a few days after I read in Tim Berners-Lee's "Weaving the Web":
"[patents] are a great stumbling block for Web development." and the
discussion hereafter (pp. 213-215).

Our position, in french, can be read at: 

http://aful.org/brevets/

Regards,

	S.

-- 
Stéfane Fermigier, Tel: +33 (0)6 63 04 12 77 (mobile).
http://nuxeo.com/ & http://portalux.com/ & http://aful.org/
"Amazon: we patent the dot in .com"

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 10:51:59 UTC