Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask the W3C's RAND Point Man

Posted by Roblimo on from the hot-seat-is-not-the-best-place-to-sit dept.

Danny Weitzner is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium's Technology and Society activities, which means he's in charge of handling reactions to a W3C proposal that would allow "Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" (hence "RAND") license fees to be charged for use of W3C-endorsed standards that are covered by patents or other trade restrictions. Many prominent Free Software and Open Source people are firmly against RAND; RMS has even emailed me personally several times, asking me to post a link to this anti-RAND story (in which he is quoted). Slashdot has mentioned this controversy before, because we, too, feel it's important.. But Danny is the person at W3C who is dealing directly with all of this, so he's the person we should question. So ask away, one question per post as usual, and we'll post Danny's answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions as soon as he gets them back to us.

1 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Veeck vs. City of Austin by sphealey · · Score: 3, Informative
    You're allowed to look at the building codes for free; you can go to the city office. You can even make copies there. However, you're not allowed to publish copies the building code.

    The city of Naperville, Illinois (for many years the fastest growing community in the US, although they have finally run out of room) writes its own plumbing code. In theory, you are free to go read it at City Hall. In practice (a) what is kept at City Hall is the revisions to the original code, rumoured to have been written in 1915 and to still exist, but which no one has ever seen (b) the actual documents are kept locked in the 3rd subbasement of the building, and can be retrieved the 3rd Tuesday of any month with an "R" in it (c) when you ask to see the code, your name is written down in a big book (d) a week later, the building inspector shows up at your house and does a top-to-bottom inspection (e) if you hire a plumbing contractor licensed by the City, no such inspection occurs. Guess who the largest contributors to local election campaigns are?

    So you see there might be some reasons why it is important for citizens to be able to re-publish their own laws.

    And that's just a plumbing code - it has nothing to do with National Security - yet!

    sPh