- From: <dank@kegel.com>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 15:25:25 -0700
- To: "Gary Lea (by way of Susan Lesch)" <G.R.Lea@btinternet.com>
- CC: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
"Gary Lea" wrote: > In the particular context of W3C's work and history, I can really understand > why people are upset about any possible move away from RF and towards RAND > licensing ... Good, glad you understand where we're coming from. > but you have to bear in mind the broader context i.e. that many > international and national technical standards organizations have already > had to permit some variant on this option for many years (e.g. ANSI, ITU, > etc., etc.) just in order to survive in the face of the growth of > consortia/trade association/industry association-based standards development > bodies. ... > At the end of the day, be clear about what is at stake here: if a decent > compromise is not found between public and private interests, W3C could be > bypassed by private sector standards developers and just left to wither on > the vine. It deserves better than that. The W3C is already being bypassed; Macromedia Flash is a proprietary, closed standard defined by code from Macromedia (see http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/licensing/fileformat/ ). Think Macromedia would have gone through the W3C if the W3C was more friendly to closed-source proprietary formats? Maybe. The question is, do you want to save the W3C by encouraging closed-source, proprietary formats like Flash, or formats (like MP3 or perhaps JPG) that require royalty payments? Given that a free alternative is *always* possible, I'd say "no". We owe it to the user community to hold out for free standards. The alternative is to cave in and become a tool of big corporations whose only interest is in extracting cash from consumers. I guess the question is: is the W3C there for the users, or there for the patent holders? - Dan - Dan
Received on Thursday, 25 July 2002 18:21:52 UTC