From: Eben Moglen moglen@columbia.edu Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 20:16:07 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: 15287.46535.662795.498768@moglen.law.columbia.edu To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
I write on behalf of the Free Software Foundation to oppose the the W3C's adoption of a patent-friendly standards policy.
The World Wide Web cannot exist as a global and uniformly-available facility of human society without free software. Apache, Perl PHP--and literally hundreds of other immediately recognizable aspects of web technology--have been outgrowths of the free software production model. Without free software, the web would be a commercialized outgrowth of a few proprietary software producers, and it would be incapable of serving, as it now does, as a force for global egalitarianism.
Because the Web employs no technology not based around completely open standards, software implementing every single facility of Web life can be produced in the free software model, and is therefore available for free modification and improvement all over the world, supplied at the marginal cost of distribution to any programmer--no matter how financially constrained--who wishes to produce new facilities and opportunities for users.
"Reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing of patented technology embodied in W3C standards will eliminate free software production from any area of Web facilities subject to those standards. Such standards will therefore provide a basis to "embrace and extend" the Web under proprietary control, excluding competition from free software, limiting technical innovation and risking the social utility of the Web.
W3C standards should not incorporate any patented technology. If patented technology is, for whatever reason, absolutely necessary to the articulation of Web standards, only such patents should be considered for inclusion as are licensed under terms compatible with section 7 of the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is the worldwide standard in free software licensing. Patents licensed compatibly with GPL can be practiced without royalty or recordkeeping obligations, and are thus useful in software that any user can modify or redistribute. The W3C patent policy should not be RAND, it should be GPL.