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IBM risks billion dollar Linux strategy with W3C RAND demands

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/22052.html


IBM risks billion dollar Linux strategy with W3C RAND demands

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Posted: 04/10/2001 at 16:53 GMT

Sources familiar with the W3C's patent policy have confirmed that demands for the standards body to adopt RAND licensing were initiated by IBM.

[...]

Hewlett Packard has been the first major industry vendor to publicly state its position, with its W3C rep Jim Bell declaring that web standards should continue to be royalty-free.

Senior IBM server executives were horrified to learn yesterday that W3C standards may not in the future be royalty-free. Internet standards and Linux have helped IBM widen its appeal in recent years, and the company has pledged $1 billion on developing and marketing Linux. But its continued investment depends on good will from the Linux developer community, and that may well be imperilled by its preference of RAND to royalty-free for the most fundamental WWW standards.

[...]


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