GPL and LGPL incompatibilities in patent policy

As someone who is in the process of implementing several W3C specs 
(Canonical XML, XML, XInclude, Namespaces, and others) in LGPL'd 
software (http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/XOM/ and 
http://xincluder.sourceforge.net/) I am very concerned that patent 
issues may prohibit people from distributing and revising my 
software.  The patent licensing required before patented technology 
can be incorporated into W3C recommendations needs to allow for 
derivation of GPL'd software in arbitrary ways that do not 
necessarily implement the recommendation.  It is not sufficient to 
require a license  only "in order to implement the standard".

If such a license is not available, the recommendation should not 
include the patented technology. It is preferable not to issue a 
recommendation than to rely on such patented technology.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

Received on Tuesday, 31 December 2002 09:37:33 UTC