eWeek: W3C reconsider patent policy

[ 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."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Mozilla.org Response to the W3C Patent Policy Framework Working Draft (Oct 11, 2001)
• Eric S. Raymond: Open Source Initiative's letter of comment on W3C's proposed RAND policy(Oct 09, 2001)
• CMP: Discussion: W3C and Patents (Oct 09, 2001)
• CNET News.com: Will W3C mean dollar signs? (Oct 05, 2001)
• MoonGroup: The W3C Fork: Coming soon to a net near you!(Oct 05, 2001)
• The Register: IBM risks billion dollar Linux strategy with W3C RAND demands (Oct 05, 2001)
• HP to W3C: We Support Royalty-Free Standards for the Web Infrastructure(Oct 04, 2001)
• The Register: We'll fork the Web to keep it Free - Perens (Oct 03, 2001)
• Debian Weekly News - October 3rd, 2001(Oct 03, 2001)
• CNET News: Gartner Commentary: Standing in way of standards(Oct 02, 2001)
• The Register: Web standards schism "terrible" - W3C patent policy boss (Oct 02, 2001)
• W3C's Response to Public Comments on the Patent Policy(Oct 02, 2001)
• CNET News: W3C Patent Plan Draws Protests(Oct 02, 2001)
• Followups on the W3C Patent Policy from Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, and Microsoft(Oct 01, 2001)
• Alan Cox: W3C Patent Policy: Bad for the W3C, bad for business, bad for users(Sep 30, 2001)
• Community: W3C and the Promotion of Fee-based Standards for the Web (Sep 30, 2001)