prohibit the imposition of "field of use" restrictions

I write to disagree with the "field of use" restrictions,
as outlined here: < www.gnu.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html >

Tim Berners-Lee has fought all along to keep the Web and its
standards/protocols open. Of most significance to us here is
his original request to CERN to fully release his HTML/HTTP
work into the public domain.

The reason for this was because the then-competing gopher
crew sought *certain* royalties, resulting in industry and
academia dropping development, and research of gopher, for
fear of infringing or having demands made on them.

I believe similar issues are at stake here.

The Internet - and the Web on top of it - has thrived on open
standards, which has seen the rapid scientific-style advancement
of the whole field because of them.

I thereby recommend that no patents of any type or with any form
of restriction be allowed in W3C standards/policies.

Received on Wednesday, 27 November 2002 19:29:15 UTC