[FYI] W3C to reconsider patent policy

[Kristian Köhntopp <kk@netuse.de>]

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-10-12-002-20-OS-LL

eWeek: W3C reconsider patent policy
Oct 12, 2001, 08 :03 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (277 reads)
(Other stories by Jeff Moad) (As seen on Gnuheter) 

[ Thanks to Mikael Pawlo for this link. ] 


 "Stung by a flood of criticism, a key Web standards group next
week will consider significant changes to its proposal to
establish a formal process for accepting patented, royalty
fee-generating technologies as official Internet standards. 

Among other changes to its original proposal, the World Wide Web
Consortium's (W3C) patent policy working group will consider
granting exemptions to open source developers so that they could
avoid paying royalty fees on patented technologies accepted as
W3C standards, said Daniel Weitzner, the working group's
chairman, in Cambridge, Mass. 

The open source exemption was just one idea generated over 2,000
public comments--most of them negative--received in late
September by the working group. The volume of criticism prompted
the working group to extend the public comment period--originally
due to expire Sept. 30--to Oct. 11." 

-- 
Kristian Köhntopp, NetUSE AG, Dr.-Hell-Straße, D-24107 Kiel
Tel: +49 431 386 435 00, Fax: +49 431 386 435 99