Ask the W3C's RAND Point Man

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.

Comments

Pants

[tomknight]

What colour pants are you wearing?

Tom.

Re:Pants

[Purple_Walrus]

none

Re:Shame on you

[zpengo]

The worst terrorist incident on the US soil took place on 11th September and you're writing about something as trivial as W3C-endorsed standards!?

No, buddy, shame on you for being one of the panicked people who would rather that we live in a nation obsessed with terrorism.

Every generation of Americans has its tragedy, and this is ours; Instead of wallowing in self-pity, we need to suck it up and get back to our lives, rather than becoming obsessed with Osama bin Loser.

Get over it. This is Slashdot. If you don't want to hear about W3 standards, go back to Stileproject.

In the words of Tom Landry...

[sulli]

"No, Danny, no!"