- From: Alex Danilo <alex@abbra.com>
- Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:10:39 +1000
- To: www-svg@w3.org
Hi All, For this sort of curve to be added to SVG, Mr Levien would have to assign royalty-free rights to any patent that may be granted in relation to his thesis work for all implementors of SVG or related W3C specs using the invention as claimed. <snip/> >Raph has a USA software idea patent on Spiro, with a GPL grant, >explained in http://levien.com/garden/ppedit/README : Well that grant is effectively useless right now. Since there is no patent granted yet, there is nothing to grant. What he should be doing is pledging to grant rights should the patent be issued in future. Here is the application: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=%22Levien+Raphael%22.IN.&OS=IN/"Levien+Raphael"&RS=IN/"Levien+Raphael" So the GPL "grant" is well and good, but to form part of a W3C spec it has to be granted to all implementors of the spec. both open and closed source. I wonder why would anyone continue to pay the considerable expenses required to obtain a patent if it was just to be given away for free? IMO, if authoring tools can use Spiro curves and generate Bezier content for rendering then the logical place for the Spiro curves themselves is in the authoring tool. That provides the author all the creative freedom they need, preserves backward compatibility (by not changing anything) and avoids the dreaded 'p' word;-) Interestingly, ASV used Beziers to approximate elliptic arcs, so one could argue those are superfluous too... It would be nice to be able to specify a curve that smoothly interpolates between a bunch of points as originally discussed, but can we please consider only technologies where the IP situation is clear. SVG.264 anyone... Alex
Received on Wednesday, 14 July 2010 22:11:42 UTC