Official documents on the W3C's site support Sutor's assertion. According to the home page of the W3C's Web Services Description Working Group, neither IBM nor Microsoft are asserting their intellectual property claims over WSDL. The same can also be said for SOAP 1.2, which falls under the jurisdiction of the royalty-free charter of the W3C's XML Protocol Working Group. Additionally, HP's status as a co-submitter of WSDL has been restored.
However, the same cannot be said for many of the other Web services protocols that actually make SOAP and WSDL useful. For example, IBM and Microsoft have yet to release their intellectual property rights to two SOAP extensions: one extension encrypts and applies digital signatures to SOAP messages, another attaches documents to the messages
They aren't threatening to charge royalties on WSDL and SOAP, just on their extensions to it. I don't understand why slashdot readers are outraged by this.
It seems completely reasonable to me. If IBM spends the time and money to translate domain knowledge into a SOAP extension (such as for encryption), IBM deserves to get a return on the investment. If you don't like this, write your own encryption extension.
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They aren't threatening to charge royalties on WSDL and SOAP, just on their extensions to it. I don't understand why slashdot readers are outraged by this.
It seems completely reasonable to me. If IBM spends the time and money to translate domain knowledge into a SOAP extension (such as for encryption), IBM deserves to get a return on the investment. If you don't like this, write your own encryption extension.