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

Finally

[KDan]

Some good developments in the great techno-legal world war. There had been too many bad ones lately...

This one would have been a small disaster if it had gone wrong. Now let's hope the EU makes the right decision too!

Daniel

It's a shame

[truthsearch]

It's really a shame that they have to allow patents at all. If they didn't they'd alienate most commercial contributors who'd then go to another standards body, or none at all. Since they do allow patents, though, it continues to promote the rediculous patenting of software processes.

Re:Good deal...

[JanneM]

That's where the technology buyers become important. When deciding on a particular platform, the PHB's may have a great deal to say about what vendor to use, but it's the tech people (the CTO, if the company is large enough to have one) that determines the basic capabilities of the proposed system. With a stated checkbox-item to use only published W3C standards where applicable, for instance, the buyers can greatly influence what technologies their vendors will support. Some vendor-specific formats nonwithstanding, this is pretty much what has happened in most areas of information technology.

Vote with your money, in other words.

Re:Bad idea.

[jgardn]

Anyone else find it interesting that this post was made a few minutes ago and almost instantly got exactly 4 moderation points for being interesting?

I'll tell you what's left when you remove royalties from the equation -- and it certainly isn't shills like you. It is innovation, freedom, and advancement for everyone. Why should I have to pay a guy a buck because he came up with the idea of a "shopping cart" on a website? Why can't I take the idea and move it forward? It is alright to patent machines and such, but patenting ideas is absurd. (And, on a lesser note, I wouldn't mind them patenting their code and only their code -- but what's the use of that?)

And ask yourself this: did the internet grow by leaps and bounds because Microsoft came out with IIS or because a bunch of organizations decided to pool their efforts to make one solid web server that can be configured to do anything a web server should do? I personally think proprietary software is holding us back and costing us far more than the cost of licensing the software because we can't take their ideas and build on them.

Then where do we get paid? Two ways: By implementing existing solutions in a way that people can use them, or by implementing entirely new solutions. For both instances, people are willing to pay money to have someone else do it. For both instances, it really doesn't matter whether the end result is Open Source or proprietary to them. We know that going the Open Source will allow us to satisfy more people with better products than the other case, because IT will constantly be evolving and building on the successes and failures of the past, rather than limiting the growth to one giant monopoly.