Regarding Royalty-Free Patent Policy, sec. 3, item 3

To Whom It May Concern--

I am concerned about Section Three, Item 3 of the Royalty-Free Patent
Policy.  It's current language could allow a developer to implement a
patent held under a non-exclusive license that has a "field of use"
restriction that says the license can be used to "implement the standard".
  If said developer uses this patent in GPL software in order to implement
the W3W standard, in certain situations this new software cannot be
redistributed under the terms of the GPL.

Please amend the policy and prohibit the imposition of "field of use"
restrictions on patent claims contributed to W3C standards.

Stephen Olszewski
soso@busymonkey.org
San Francisco, CA

Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 02:45:36 UTC