Fear not, nothing heinous. I share the same concerns you do. I think it is ridiculous some of the patents that have been applied for (and granted). It bugs me to no end. I've seen things like the SCO suit which is a last-ditch desperation move by a dying company, and the many ridiculous dot-com lawsuits, and even some in our industry (manufacturing) around what was supposed to be an "open standard".
In fact, I've always been pretty willing to share what we've been doing as far as the SVG animation part of it. Just that no one seemed to be interested ;). The "unique" stuff we're doing is more in our connectivity and data binding approach to manufacturing and ERP data sources. I'm all for opening up and sharing what we're doing around SVG and visualization. We gain significant value from open source efforts and have contributed (code, testing, and $$$) to many of them. Things like W3C-driven standards efforts have always seemed like a bit of a closed club. Irregardless, I'd be all for a "non-standard" but valuable open source effort around this type of effort. Anyone interested? - Rick -----Original Message----- From: Barend K�bben [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 3:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [svg-developers] XMl 2 SVG Rick, although I recognise the need of the possibility to actually earn money using an open standard like SVG, the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I read "created a (patent applied for) model ". Apart from the obvious question what on earth you guys might think is unique in your 'model', software developers in the'open' community in Europe are currently trying to convince the EU not to follow the disastrous road of patenting that eg the US has been taking. Come on people, we are in serious threat of living , in a few years from now, in a world where big companies will sue you for making a program that uses the concept "it starts loading data when you use an 'open menu' command", just because they happen to have been the first who patented this "unique idea"... ____________________________ Barend K�bben International Institute for Geo-information Sciences and Earth Observation (ITC) PO Box 6, 7500AA Enschede (The Netherlands) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $4.98 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything. http://us.click.yahoo.com/Q7_YsB/neXJAA/yQLSAA/1U_rlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
