Don't change policy.

W3C is in the risk of becoming a corporate interest group, caring more 
for the corporate members profits than standards and interoperability. 
There is no such thing as a "non-discriminatory" patents, it all depends 
on how much the patent holder cares to uphold it.

There is also no such thing as reasonable licensing.  Consider that the 
world wide web started on free software, and for that kind of software 
no licensing cost is reasonable at all.

It is sad to see that W3C is sucking up to corporate interests and 
forgetting the base from where WWW started.  W3C will surely become an 
irrelevant group that nobody cares about if this move is made.  After 
all, the patent holders will be controlling the web, not W3C so why 
should anyone care about W3C in the future?

Keep standard patent free.  To do otherwise is to kill yourselves.

	Jan D.

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 12:29:17 UTC