RAND

Dear Sirs,

I just read about the proposal to license W3C recommendations (RAND).

I believe it would be against the spirit of the Internet and the free
software movement that made the widespread adoption of the Internet and WWW
possible.

HTML and coming standards such as SVG should remain in the public domain.
There is still enough money to be made with authoring tools and
products/services surrounding the specification (books, seminars etc.).

But asking a royality for the implementation of those technologies could
cause a servere split among the Internet community. I can imagine the
OpenSouce movement developing a competing standard if it will appear that
under the licensing model the corporate powerhouses play an unfair game.

When MP3 started asking for royalities, it took only one week until a
developer started coding an opensource audio encoder (Ogg Vorbis).

Please keep the W3C recommendations in the public domain.

Thank you.


Kind regards

-Zavier Sheran

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 17:18:14 UTC