Keep pay-for-play patents from the W3C

As some one that created technology at a small firm that was later patented by a certain LARGE company, I would like to state that patents for software and the W3C's adoption would certainly slow down the development of the web. In my case the certain very large company came after us for royalty payments. It diverted enough of the money of our little company that it almost put us out of business. Our sin? We used technology that we created some years before the big important company did. To make matters worse we purposely didn't patent the stuff because we don't believe in them! Our other sin? We didn't think it important enough to make a big deal out of it - it was just something we did as part of building our systems.

Chuck Wegrzyn