[ale] FW: A side point of importance..yeah, you could say that - Greg

[Greg]

	This comes from the OpenBSD list that I subscribe to.  It apparently seems
that IBM (yup,I was surprised also) and Microsoft among others are trying to
get the W3C to begin to making certain companies patented technologies a
standard.. and thus when someone uses that "standard" then they will have to
either pay a license fee (AFTER the money to develop has been spent) or
withdraw the product / application.  I have known that MS hovers around the
w3c so that they can be the "first" to implement technologies and that they
were on a campaign to make C# the "genuine W3C language" but I had no idea
it had gone this far.

	Can you imagine having to pay to use HTML or JavaScript... or face the
lawyers?  It is like the current bill winding through the Congress to have
the ISP's charge $ 0.05 for an email (seems the US Post Office lost several
billions to email last year).  And NO, it is NOT and urban legend this
time - sorry but I don't have the bill's number handy at home. <sigh>

Is there no end to the greed of Man ? Damm

Greg

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-misc at openbsd.org [mailto:owner-misc at openbsd.org] On Behalf
To: ale at ale.org
Of Theo de Raadt
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 7:36 PM
To: misc at openbsd.org
Subject: A side point of importance


In case some of you are not aware yet, please read this.  It is a very
careful and impressive analysis of what W3C is trying to do.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Nov/0014.ht
ml

W3C is trying to fuck us.

There's just no other way to see it (it gets real interesting about 3/4
through)


from a Ralph Forsythe

The extremely short version is that the W3C, currently made up mostly of
for-profit corporations (and a small representation from the open source
community), is trying to move their standards out of a royalty-free license
(currently the policy) into what is called a RAND license, or "Reasonable
and Non-Discriminatory".  This would mean that products developed with W3C
recommendations would require licensing (with compensation to the license
holder), putting the ability to conform to these standards out of the reach
of pretty much all open source developers.

The suggestions to change this from that page are basically to send email
outlining various points (info is at the bottom of that page, you can read
it).  Should this have no effect and the new policy ideas are put into
action, the author then suggests the open source community form it's own
web standards organization, which is a good idea -- I just hope it isn't
necessary.  The long and short of it is that Theo's statement on their
intention is sadly true.  The corporations want a bigger piece, and they're
trying to get it.





---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.