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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.

5 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Shame on you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    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!?

    1. Re:Shame on you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      All major surveys show that Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us a states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. OpenBSD leader Theo he number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is T0 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead,its corpse turned over to another charnel house. went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell anotherts ar survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to dec *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospec the number of FreeBSD Usenet pos Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. roughly in r NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD article put FreeBSD at about 8ts. Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD *BSD is dying tical purposes, *BSD is dead.

  2. What by gmhowell · · Score: -1, Troll

    What the fuck is your major malfunction numbnuts? Did your mommy not love you enough?

    --
    Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
  3. Need RAND advice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I inherently fear the RAND proposals but will be for the rules if it allows me to overcome the lameness filter on Slashdot so that users may post ASCII art depicting acts of sodomy and penis-birds.

    Any plans?

    Anxiously awaiting your reply,
    AC

  4. point man by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    "point man" is such a retarded metaphor. i picture a "point man" as being either a) the receiver of a gay rimjob, or b) the "winner" in a 6 man circle jerk