On Thursday 29 June 2006 08:37 pm, Rony wrote:
On Thu, Jun 29, 2006 at 05:50:19PM +0530, jtd wrote:
Patenting software is a very bad idea. W3C cloaks this stupiity with fancy words RAND and RF. Although W3C states that the standards are Royalty free and available on RAND terms, it effectively adds a thick legal layer precluding individuals / organisations from creating standards compliant systems without going thru a legal and technical whetting of the patent.
Can you explain it in simple terms? Does it mean that anyone who creates a website needs to seek legal permission from the royalty owners?
For use of the patented portion. How do u know whats patented?. Get the patent from the patent office. DONT READ IT or else u will be contaminated. Give it to a 2nd team who will read everything and read the standards and draft a spec that will not violate the patent. U can then read that spec and come up with code that works. the first team that read the patent will ofcourse never use the knowledge that they gained by reading the patent. You have effectively doubled your cost and work because a standard has been written based on technology that is patented (meaning that the standard is cooked to force use of the patent). Note that if a standard was written and somebody designed a compliant widget and patented that it would be no problem. There can be many solutions that differ substantially from the first solution.
RAND = Reasonable And Non Discriminatory. The patent owner decides what is reasonable. Like permission is granted for use subject to this NDA and subject to the recipient of your binary registering with me and No Disclosing Code. This is applicable to anyone who applies therefore ND. And no royalty under these terms so Royalty free clause satisfied. Of course if u need something less cumbersome and dont want to disclose your client list lets talk $$$. So that satisfies the Royalty Free clause. It is RF and ND and reasonable, it requires compliance that is commonplace for closed software. And effectively shuts out competition from libre software developers. RAND licences (for designing hardware) that i have seen require payment of a tiny royalty - 1 cent - subject to a minimum royalty of USD 100000. And the omnipresent NDA.