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

[Joseph A Knapka]

Greg wrote:
> 
>         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).

Do that, and watch the technology sector collapse :-)

>  And NO, it is NOT and urban legend this
> time - sorry but I don't have the bill's number handy at home. <sigh>

This is pretty scary stuff. Mr. Maddux suggests that
if the W3C won't back off of their attempt to impose a RAND
licensing policy, the only alternative would be for the
open-source community to constitute its own standards body
and "fork the Web Standards development process". That
would, IMO, be bad for everyone. It's questionable
whether the os community could even finance such a
project, which would require a fleet of patent lawyers
to ensure that the standards being developed don't
infringe the patents of the exact same gang of
bozos who're trying to hijack the W3C.

[snip]

Cheers,

-- Joe
# "I have a theory: it could be bunnies!" - Anya (BVS)
# (Obsolete) Linux MM docs:
http://home.earthlink.net/~jknapka/linux-mm/vmoutline.html

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