On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Robert O'Callahan wrote: > > I hear that you made some comments on IRC about the W3C patent policy. > Unfortunately I wasn't around ... I and I'm sure a lot of others would > like to hear what you have to say. Could you make a newsgroup post or > something? Thanks (hopefully)!
There isn't much to say. Most of it is pretty clearly stated in http://www.w3.org/2001/10/patent-response To summarise: 1. The current situation is *not* that of royalty free licenses automatically applying to standards. The W3C currently has *no* patent policy, and this has bitten the community in the past, e.g. with P3P. 2. The proposal would guarentee that all standards are available to everyone in the form of Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licenses, i.e. free software groups would not be excluded (assuming they can pool together resources to afford the license). There is currently NO guarentee of this kind. 3. Without these rules, there is no guarentee that some standards will not get sabottaged, e.g. P3P, XPointer. 4. If the rules demand Royalty Free licensing throughout, some standards will simply not get developed at the W3C (and thus in an environment reasonably open to the public) -- e.g. XPointer has a patent covering a part of it (IIRC), and there is no sign that the company owning this patent will in any way accept to license it for free -- they would rather that part of the standard was dropped, as far as I can tell. (There is work on creating a subset of XPointer that isn't covered by this patent.) This is an important point to emphasise: Get real, welcome to the world, companies are not going to give away their "Intellectual Property" when they don't have to. Just like the W3C will become irrelevant if they have no freely implementable standards, they will also be irrelevant if every standard is developed somewhere else simply because companies don't want to give away their "Intellectual Property". 5. Other standard organisations (IETF, ANSI, etc) do not have any rules requiring Royalty Free licenses for patents covering their standards. 6. Many companies (Microsoft is a particular famous example of this) get patents left right and centre for one reason and one reason alone: defense in case someone else sues them (the idea is that if company A sues company B for breaking patent W, company B can turn around and counter-sue company A for breaking patents X, Y and Z. It is then cheaper for company A to drop the subject than to run both battles through the courts). 7. Given 6, I would strongly recommend that free software contributors start getting patents of their own. (This is similar in spirit to the idea given in [1]). Indeed, I would strongly recommend that free software proponents patent every idea under the sun, and then make them publically available to all free software projects (and maybe _only_ these -- thus turning the tables on the proprietary world). An example of someone who did something like this is at [2]. 8. My personal idea of patents is somewhat similar to RMS'. [3] 9. If you want patent-free protocols, then join [4]. 10. If you worry about patented web standards, remember that Microsoft own a patent on CSS [5] and have never given anyone an explicit license for its use. Do you trust Microsoft not to sue Mozilla through the floor because of this? (I do; see 6.) And finally: yes, I boycott Amazon [6]. -- References -- [1] http://dotgnu.org/pipermail/developers/2001-August/000702.html [2] http://www.advogato.org/article/89.html [3] http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/patent-reform-is-not-enough.html [4] http://www.freeprotocols.org/ [5] http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05860073__ ($75 fee required) [6] http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/amazon.html -- Ian Hickson )\ _. - ._.) fL /. `- ' ( `--' `- , ) - > ) \ irc.mozilla.org:Hixie _________________________ (.' \) (.' -' __________
