"Royalty-free" Last Call Draft proposals

Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to express my objection to the Last Call draft produced by 
the W3C Consortium Patent Policy Working Group.  Specifically I object 
to Section 3, which allows patented, non-Free (in the sense used by the 
Free Software Foundation) methods to be established as part of the W3C's 
standards.

Your position of trust and responsibility to all web-users would be 
abused if you integrated these proposals into W3C standards, thus 
disenfranchising those who run GPL only systems.  It would facilitate 
the propagation of restrictive patenting which has done so much to harm 
innovation and competition.  

Thank you for listening to my concerns,
Yours Sincerely,
Oisin Feeley

Received on Monday, 16 December 2002 19:28:44 UTC