- From: David Eppstein <eppstein@ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 11:04:17 -0700
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
I read on Slashdot that you are considering a change in policy to allow fee-based patents to be used for W3C standards. My point of view, as a random web user and site developer: currently I see you (W3C) as being one of very few groups devoted to maintaining the quality of the web experience for all users, without regard to corporate profit. I have a lot of respect for your standards; I go out of the way to make my own pages obey them as much as possible, and complain when other sites' lack of compliance interferes with my browsing. The ability for anyone to write standards-compliant software without paying fees to large corporations is a big part of why the web is usable to me; as one instance, I maintain a small academic web site that includes some on-the-fly image generation, possible without fees thanks to your support of the PNG standard in place of fee-based GIF image encoding. Your support of free solutions is a big part of why I respect your standards. If you make this change, you suddenly become yet another industry coalition mouthpiece in my mind, and your standards will have no more interest to me than the ones promoted by Microsoft, Netscape, Apple, or Sun -- perhaps less, because you have less power to enforce those standards with your software. -- David Eppstein UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science eppstein@ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 14:04:54 UTC