Worried about possible non-approval of draft policy

Hi...

I've been vaguely following the development of the W3C draft policy on
patent licensing in W3C standards. I'm kind of worried at the moment that
due to fundamental philosophical objections from the FSF, you may get the
impression that there is not sufficient support from the community in
general for the policy as it currently stands.

Clearly, various large companies with large (software) patent portfolios
are also likely to be unhappy with the current draft.

I'm strongly opposed to software patents in their current form, but I
would like to take this opportunity to emphasize that I believe that
the current draft policy is reasonably successful in treading the thin
line between lack of support from large corporates due to requirements
that they see as "giving away the family silver", and lack of support
for the policy from the community at large due to the perception that
the W3C might be pandering to the larger companies represented at the
W3C.

If policy were to deviate much in either direction from the current
proposal, then one constituency or other would probably decide that
the W3C was no longer relevant to their needs, and go elsewhere.

Put simply, I think that the current policy is, given the way software
patents currently "work", pretty close to the best possible compromise,
and I would like to see it adopted.

I'd also like to see patent law changed in many ways, but I hope there's
rather more hope of getting what I want with regard to W3C policy (given
that the draft is already there) than with patent law in general ;)



Cheers,


Nick
-- 
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
Is this really happening?

Received on Tuesday, 7 January 2003 05:19:07 UTC