At the center of the patent storm (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com talks with Danny Weitzner, chair of the W3C patent policy working group. "The open-source community has played a really important role at the W3C because, clearly, royalty-bearing standards create a fundamental problem for open-source software. But the need for royalty-free standards would exist even if there were no open-source solutions."

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Posted Sep 25, 2002 19:48 UTC (Wed) by sphealey (guest, #1028) [Link]

I really enjoyed this comment:

The open-source community has played a really important role at the W3C because, clearly, royalty-bearing standards create a fundamental problem for open-source software. But the need for royalty-free standards would exist even if there were no open-source solutions.

Um, shouldn't that be something like since the Web was built on free software, the community that created that software is a bit concerned that extensions of their work might be used to fence off the Web for profit? The fundamental issue in this debate is who will control the future of the Web; failing to acknowledge that point seems like a pretty good indication of what the outcome is intended to be.

sPh

I really enjoyed this comment...

Posted Sep 25, 2002 20:21 UTC (Wed) by nick.leroy (subscriber, #109) [Link]

Sounds like the golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

-Nick