"The inclusion of patents into the W3C's standards
moves the W3C from being an organization that "promotes and
develops its vision of the future of the World Wide Web" to an
industry group that defines standards to build revenue streams for
its Members. None of the goals of the W3C talk about making money
from the infrastructure of the Web. In fact, the discussion of
commerce of any kind is noticeably absent. The role of the W3C
appears to be to help build technical standards for the Web so that
all other forms of communication and commerce can take place on top
of that infrastructure.
If there needs to be a venue where companies can get together
and create documents that describe their patent-encumbered
standards, they should do that outside of the W3C. The W3C should
promote standards that are truly freely available. This would
promote truly interoperable software and standards and would put
the resulting technologies into the hands of as many people as
possible."
