- From: David Monniaux <monniaux@di.ens.fr>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 18:32:44 +0200
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
During the last decade, online systems have grown from limited services only available to certain categories of people (the military, academic institutions) or providing limited possibilities (BBS, Minitel) to an international network with ever expanding capabilities. One driving factor behind this phenomenon is that, by a large extent, clients and servers have been able to interoperate because of the existence of open standards. Note that the current situation is not perfect: because of badly documented or proprietary extensions, users can experience frustration when accessing many sites, often because they do not use the latest version of the most mainstream operating system or browser. Studies point out that many people do not feel like using Internet E-commerce because the system is unreliable and perceived to be so - and incompatibilities that induce errors during transactions only contribute to those unreliabilities. Common sense dictates that we should avoid as much as possible those incompatibilities, which for the most part do not yield interesting features for the user. Comprehensive public standards contribute to reducing incompatibilities and unreliability. Since today, software development, and most notably WWW-related software development, is undertaken by anything from groups of volunteers around the World to multinational corporations, it seems that the standards should be designed to be equally accessible to all those developers. Accessibility by groups of volunteers and small businesses require that the standards themselves remain free (some standard bodies charge hefty costs, which may be acceptable to medium- or large-sized corporations, but certainly not to volunteers) and that they should be unencumbered by patents (either containing no patented material, either requiring that the patent holders grant a royalty-free license to the patented material when used for implementing the standard). That last requirement applies more particularly to the so-called "free" or "open-source" software, since the developers are not able to redeem the cost of the patents on the users. In short: * Using patented technologies in standards will contribute to incompatibilities and thus will encumber efforts to develop reliable WWW services. * Using patented technologies in standards will effectively prevent "free software" from being available for the services described in the standard, depriving the users from choice and the marketplace from healthy competition. -- David Monniaux http://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux Département d'informatique de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France [This mail expresses my personal opinion as a researcher, not an official position of ENS.]
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 12:33:17 UTC