[Zope] W3C and the Promotion of Fee-based Standards for the Web

[Holger Blasum]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 05:18:42PM +1000, Andrew Kenneth Milton wrote:
> +-------[ kapil thangavelu ]----------------------
> | 
> | On 16 August 2001 the W3C made public a proposal to substantially change 
> | their patent policy framework. Amongst the changes is support for a new 
> | licensing model (called RAND) that legitimises the W3C's role in developing 
> | and promoting standards that could require the payment of royalties. This is 
> 
> Most standards bodies require payment to get access to standards in some shape
> or form. It was only a matter of time. A lot of people aren't happy with the
> way W3C has been going on various items. Of course if they're getting money
> from somewhere else maybe they can free themselves of the influence of some
> of the places the money is coming from now.

Just in case the sarcasm of the above statement doesn't get through: 

That practice was justified in the times (before 1990) when the services of 
standard bodies were actually an economically scarce resource (think of the 
type-setters, printers, secretaries sending physical documents and 
newsletters to clients and libraries all over the world). 

Especially it is not a valid argument for the W3C as of today with 
bandwidth coming from the public institutions DARPA and EU and personnel 
being housed in the public institutions MIT, INRIA (French Research Institute) 
and Keio Univ (Japan).

This design as a ''virtual'' (post 1990) standards body has been the W3Cs 
source of reputation and its unique selling point. 

For the purists: The issue with the W3C patent's policy is not paying
for *accessing* standards, but paying for *implementing* them, but 
the resulting market distortion is similar.

Numerous responses have been coming in today at: 

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Sep/

-- 
Holger Blasum <holger@blasum.net>
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