Re: Please Help Pass W3C Patent Policy

[Toni Mueller <toni@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 04:09:32PM +0100, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
>     With respect to a Recommendation developed under this policy, a W3C
>     Royalty-Free license shall mean a non-assignable, non-sublicensable
>     license to make, have made, use, sell, have sold, offer to sell,
>     import, and distribute and dispose of implementations of the
>     Recommendation that:
> 
>         [...]
> 
>         3. may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and
>            to what is required by the Recommendation;

before having read the whole draft:

To me this passage implies that the new policy allows for patents
to go into a standard that would only shift the battlefield by
restricting Open Source implementations of those standards to the
required parts while being forced to leave out the optional parts
a standard may have unless you want to fall under those royalty
claims.

Is this an oversight, am I just reading it wrong, or what the heck
should agreeing to such a clause buy us? I just expect new standards
under this rule to have lots of optional features and a two class
system of applications which only conform to the minimal set, and
those which implement the "full" standard.


Best,
--Toni++