[luau] News - W3C Patent Board Recommends Royalty-Free Policy

[Warren Togami]

Bruce Perens continues the good fight, protecting Open Source Software's
rights to implement W3C standards.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/07/1159206&mode=thread&tid=95

Bruce Perens writes "A year ago, the World Wide Web Consortium proposed
a policy to allow royalty-generating patents to be embedded in web
standards. This would have been fatal to the ability of Free Software to
implement those standards. There was much protest, including over 2000
emails to the W3C Patent Policy Board spurred on by a call to arms
published on Slashdot. As a result of the complaints, I was invited to
join W3C's patent policy board, representing Software in the Public
Interest (Debian's corporation) -- but really the entire Free Software
community. I was later joined in this by Eben Moglen, for FSF, and Larry
Rosen, for the Open Source Initiative." Bruce has written more below -
it's well worth reading.

After a year of argument and see-sawing, W3C's patent policy board has
voted to recommend a royalty-free patent policy. This recommendation
will be put in the form of a draft and released for public comment.
There will probably be a dissenting minority report from some of the
large patent holders. Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C Advisory Committee,
composed of representatives from all of the consortium's members, will
eventually make the final decision on the policy. My previous
interaction with the Advisory Committee and Berners-Lee lead me to feel
that they will approve the royalty-free policy.

...

Now, we must take this fight elsewhere. Although IETF has customarily
been held up as the paragon of openness, they currently allow
royalty-bearing patents to be embedded in their standards. This must
change, and IETF has just initiated a policy discussion to that effect.
We must pursue similar policies at many other standards bodies, and at
the governments and treaty organizations that persist in writing bad
law.

...

 I'd like to give credit to HP. Because I was representing SPI, and HP
had someone else representing them at W3C, I made it clear to my HP
managers that they would not be allowed to influence my role at W3C -
that would have created a conflict-of-interest for me, as well as giving
HP unfair double-representation. HP managers understood this, and were
supportive. During all but the very end of the process, HP paid my
salary and travel expenses while they knew that I was functioning as an
independent agent who would explicitly reject their orders. Indeed, HP
allowed me to influence their policy, rather than the reverse. This was
the result of enlightened leadership by Jim Bell, Scott K. Peterson,
Martin Fink, and Scott Stallard.
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