W3C Approved Patent Policy: Royalty Free Standards

Danny Weitzner writes "The World Wide Web Consortium has approved the W3C Patent Policy based on review by the W3C Advisory Committee and thanks to lots of input and cajoling from the Open Source community and slashdoters. Read the public Director's decision. We're the first major standards organization that sets the explicit goal of producing only standards that can be implemented without paying patent royalties. Our policy requires legal commitments from all who contribute to the development of Web standards that patents held by the contributor will be available on royalty-free terms. Both proprietary and open source software have been critical to the growth of the Web. With this policy, we intend to enabled continued innovation by both open source and proprietary development."

Comments

Object of Desire

[SimplexO]

It's good that they are doing something to protect the people. Now I just hope they don't screw up XHTML 2.

Re:Object of Desire

[Bruce Perens]

I just write in old-style HTML and then have "html tidy" do the translation for me. It's a nice free software tool packaged well on Debian and no doubt elsewhere.

Bruce

Re:Object of Desire

[kikta]

Call me wacky, but maybe that's because CSS3 is still under development.

Re:hmmmm

[aborchers]

I wonder whether this will make getting software patents easier or harder, and whether people who failed to get a royalty patent go for one of these instead?

It will make no difference. W3C does not issue patents, governments do. The issue here is that patented work with non-free licenses will not be accepted as W3C standards.

Re:/. editors never heard of a hyphen?

[julesh]

Don't they teach English in schools anymore? Or are they just teaching it wrong? It's "Royalty-Free Standards", so people's brains can instantly know that it isn't to be read as "Royalty Free-Standards".

I consider my English pretty good, and I thought you were wrong there. So I dug out my Oxford Manual of Style to look up what it said about the case. And I must concede you were right. For anyone interested in why, here's the rule:

"Hyphenate two or more modifiers preceding the noun when they form a unit modifying the noun" and gives the example "a stainless-steel table", as opposed to "a table of stainless steel".

Live and learn.

So you do.

Re:Does this mean the Web is GPLed?

[rumpledstiltskin]

funny, but no, of course not. just because the w3c standards are going to be royalty free doesn't mean they are gpl'd. quite the contrary, in fact, considering that the gpl *encourages* people to charge for their work. Remember, Free does not always mean GPL.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument does not apply if patent application filed before standards publication.

Re:Good deal...

[Raphael]

I doubt that this will be that great a deal - instead, look for the W3C to become less and less relevant going forward.

Unfortunately, this is already happening. Look at the Web Services area. OASIS has taken the lead for the standardization of most Web Services technologies working on top of SOAP (UDDI, ebXML, SAML, XACML, etc.) Is it a coincidence that OASIS has a RAND policy instead of a royalty-free policy?

Is is a coincidence that some large companies pulled out of W3C and moved to OASIS? Of course, there are other reasons than the patent policy. The high membership fees of the W3C may be working against it. Also, some political wars between IBM, Microsoft and Sun can explain why some discussions started in some W3C working groups were killed and moved to OASIS. But still, I am hoping that W3C can regain some of the influence that it has lost in the recent months. Otherwise, the royalty-free policy may be largely irrelevant.

One more month...

[Anonymous Coward]

and LZW is free.

Patent #4,558,302 expires on June 20, 2003.

Joy!