Perspective: The patent threat to the Web (News.com) [LWN.net]

Bruce Perens has written an editorial that looks at the W3C recommendation to maintain a royalty-free policy. "Had the decision gone for so-called "RAND" patents--licensed with "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms," but sometimes requiring royalty payments--the effect would have been to create a tollbooth on the Internet, owned by the largest corporations, collecting a fee for the right to implement open standards. Open-source developers, who do not collect royalties--and thus cannot afford to pay them--would have been locked out entirely. Smaller companies that develop proprietary software would have been at a disadvantage, compared with the largest corporations, which cross-license their patent portfolios to each other and thus would not be burdened by royalty payments."

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