- From: David Leppik <david@leppik.net>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 14:19:04 -0500
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
The Working Draft was brought to my attention today, so please excuse what has been a rather hasty reading of the document. I applaud your efforts to have a clear process for discovering and handling patents as part of the W3 Process. However, I have some serious disagreements with the RAND licensing terms. The problem with RAND as it is currently written is that it does not allow for open source implementations. As a developer, I find open source tools to often be the most important ones I bring to a project. This is due to the ease with which they can be evaluated and brought into a project as well as the guarantee that I will be able to deploy them no matter what happens to the creator of the tools. They also place an unchanging floor on the deployment cost of that component and allow me to deploy without waiting for license negotiations to finish. In particular, Apache.org is usually the first place I and my coworkers go when we need third-party software. It is valuable to be able to prototype all parts on Linux and deploy on Linux, Solaris or Windows, depending on my client's needs. While I recognize the argument that RAND is tolerable for application layer services, I have to disagree. When I'm writing an application, I use components at all levels. Application layer software has a tendency to creep into server software for various purposes. For example, a graphics reader may be needed to convert an image to a different format or to modify the image. I am also concerned about developing standards which are usable world-wide. Users in many parts of the world do not have the money to pay for commercial software. Many countries do not have the legal infrastructure to enforce patent laws. Open source software allows them to be first-class citizens on the World Wide Web, both as content producers and consumers. It can also allow them to localize software. If all the software which uses a particular W3 standard is produced by a few primarily American companies, many languages and cultures will be shut out because localization wouldn't be cost effective. This makes the standard less of a world-wide standard and more of an industry consortium. I recommend one of the following changes: 1. Explicitly spell out the situations under which a RAND license is acceptable. I think the license is acceptable when all components have RF alternatives. For example, a PNG file may be written or read using RAND algorithms-- and the best compression algorithms may even be proprietary-- but PNG files can be written using RF algorithms, while RF PNG readers can read any PNG file. 2. Require that all RAND licenses allow anyone to create a royalty-free open source implementations of the Recommendation, or to release an implementation under such a license. My second recommendation is probably the more workable. Commercial, closed-source software would still require license payments. By using a restrictive license such as GPL, patent holders could maximize the use of royalty-paying implementations. It would, for example, allow me to prototype my software with a GPL-based library but only sell it using a commercial library. Care must be taken, however, to make sure that the licenses RAND would allow are truly open source and compatible with other open source software. Again, I thank you for your efforts to make a sound, workable patent policy and wish you luck. David Leppik -- David Leppik http://www.leppik.net/david/ David@Leppik.net
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 15:19:12 UTC