marbux wrote:
> That limitation [that IP owners retain right to enforce conformance]
> is unavoidable, I think, if you're going to have patents running
> around the IT ecosystem. If patent holders don't limit the grant of
> rights to conformant implementations, they're in effect signing a
> blank check for others to embrace and extend a spec in any way they
> see fit, constituting a waiver of their patent rights. to talk
> corporate lawyers into not defining what rights they're giving away
> is a really hard sell. :-)
We may be talking past each other here.
A given technology relies on a specific set of patents. (Patents are
the only form of IP we're really concerned with, right?) The org
proposing the standard should be able to fully waive its rights to
those specific patents, without waiving any rights to patents the
standard does not use.
Of course, it's hard to determine which of, e.g., IBM's 43 gazillion
patents are relevant to any given standard.
The org proposing the standard does have a strong incentive to give
away the patents. They want to sell the information systems that use
that format. In the last decade the realization that open source and
open standards can be used to sell complementary goods has pretty much
permeated the parts of the tech industry that I know. Everybody
has a "we'll give away the X and sell the Y" strategy.
There's a value that I'd like to see protected, and that's the value
of mashups (for lack of a better term), the re-use of a format for a
radically different purpose. I'm concerned that IP owners will use
conformance rules to prevent that kind of re-use.
I'm sure you're aware how huge the value of mashups is. Just think
about the transition from HTML -> Ajax or Linux on the desktop PC ->
Linux in your phone, car, TV, and radio station. The W3C and Linus
Torvalds are pro-mashup, of course, but imagine what we'd have lost if
they weren't.
But maybe that's outside the scope of what you want to accomplish,
or maybe it's a bigger battle than you want to start.
> Unfortunately, there's a meme that runs around IT standards
> development organizations I've worked with that it's bad form for IT
> standards to specify application behavior even for interoperability
> purposes. It's more a social value than it is a reasoned position, but
> that particular meme is probably responsible for more
> under-specification in standards than any other factor I've run up
> against.
We geeks like mashups. (-:
No, seriously, I agree, it's a bad meme.
> kbob:
>
> > Why did you insert that phrase ["that was unique to the
> > specification when introduced"]? You're thinking of something I
> > haven't thought of.
marbux:
> You're right that the part needs work. The reason for a phrase along
> those lines is perhaps best explained by an example. Let's use the
> OpenDocument standard and assume that it fulfills all requirements of
> the UAIS. OpenDocument incorporates by reference parts of the SVG
> Recommendation. But OpenDocument is an OASIS/ISO/IEC standard while
> SVG is a W3C recommendation. OASIS/ISO/IEC have no ownership rights in
> XML and SVG upon which they could base a waiver requirement. W3C has
> the relevant rights. There's a legal need to exclude the parts of the
> OpenDocument standard owned by W3C from the waiver of rights required
> by the OpenDocument standard. Those rights are held by W3C, not
> OASIS/ISO/IEC, and only W3C can set conditions --- such as a waiver
> --- on use of its standards.
Ug. I think you've just demonstrated that no UAIS can incorporate
any non-UAIS standard and remain open.
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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