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"We'll fork the web to keep it Free" - Perens

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21994.html

We'll fork the web to keep it Free - Perens

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Posted: 03/10/2001 at 07:30 GMT

Free software developers are ready and willing to take up the challenge of creating open web standards, if the W3C implements royalty-bearing licenses.

So says open source leader Bruce Perens, in one of the first responses to our Q and A with the man steering the W3C's patent policy, Danny Weitzner, where the issue of a forked WWW was raised.

"They say RAND licenses are inevitable - well, that's a choice, you know," Perens told us.

[...]

The Gartner Group agrees that a forked web will be more likely if the W3C's RAND policy is implemented, with analyst Kathy Harris saying that royalty-bearing standards are divisive and troublesome:-

"Choosing to allow payment for patents will inevitably encourage still more alternative standards bodies (by industry, for instance) and domain-specific standards," she writes.

[...]

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