Section 3(3) needs to be amended

To whom it may concern:

While this latest draft is a huge improvement over earlier drafts, to
which I and many others objected vehemently in earlier comments, there
remains one item that subverts the goal of ensuring that W3C standards
remain implementable by free software.

Section 3, under item 3, states that royalty-free license grants may be
"limited ... to what is required by the Recommendation." Free Software, by
definition, cannot include such a limitation. This single phrase in item
3, as innocent as it may appear to the casual reader, can easily be used
as a weapon to prevent free software implementations.

I strongly recommend that this defect, which contradicts the stated
general goals of the recommendation, be corrected before the
recommendation is accepted.

With kind regards,

Joachim Achtzehnter

-- 
joachim@kraut.ca          (http://www.kraut.ca)

Received on Monday, 6 January 2003 18:23:06 UTC