- From: Norbert Bollow <nb@cisto.com>
- Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 12:27:25 +0100 (CET)
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
- Cc: rms@gnu.org, coreteam@dotgnu.org
Dear members of the W3C Patent Policy Working Group, when I read in the press release http://www.w3.org/2003/03/patentpolicy-pressrelease under the heading "W3C Patent License Requirements Consistent with Open Source/Free Software Terms" that "The W3C Royalty-Free license requirements are now consistent with generally recognized Open Source licensing terms. This Royalty-Free definition provides an assurance that the Recommendations themselves are truly available to all users and implementors." I thought that the issue which is raised in the FSF's statement of position http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html had been resolved in the new draft. This is unfortunately not true. The new draft policy still allows the creation of W3C standards which are impossible to implement in GPL-compatible Free Software. I note that the GNU GPL is the most generally recognized license not only the in the Free Software movement but also in the Open Source movement. The above-quoted statement is therefore wrong and misleading, until the policy bug gets fixed which allows the creation of W3C standards which are impossible to implement in GPL-compatible Free Software. Since the DotGNU project is committed to using the GNU GPL, this means that whenever a W3C standard is patent-encumbered with a patent license that allows to use the patent _only_ "in order to implement the standard", then the DotGNU webservice platform will not provide any implementation of that W3C standard. In fact, we would have to quickly create a competing standard and actively lobby against widespread adoption of the patent-encumbered standard as that would be the only way to achieve interoperability between DotGNU and other webservice systems. I feel that such a "standards war" would be highly undesirable. However, I would have no hesitations to fight such a "standards war" if that is necessary in order to allow the DotGNU project to achieve its mission. It is my understanding that it is the objective of the W3C's proposed patent policy to prevent W3C standards from becoming the cause of such "standards wars". Therefore I urge you to revise the policy to make sure that it will be possible to implement W3C standards in GPL'd Free Software. For example, in section 3 item 3, the sentence "may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and to what is required by the Recommendation" could be changed to something like "may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and to what is required by the Recommendation, if at the same time a separate royalty-free license allows use of the patent in all Free Software which is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License". Greetings, Norbert. -- Founder & Steering Committee member of http://gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/ Free Software Business Strategy Guide ---> http://FreeStrategy.info Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland) Tel +41 1 972 20 59 Fax +41 1 972 20 69 http://norbert.ch
Received on Thursday, 27 March 2003 10:14:57 UTC