On 11/18/2013 7:39 PM, Duncan Bayne wrote:
I'm not sure what you think we rejected after an uproar from the
community. W3C was the first to reject patent encumbered technology and
did it under the direction of Tim Berners-Lee.
I've retyped this sentence four times now, with each revision becoming
progressively more polite. In entirely polite form: your statement is
true, Jeff, but omits much.
This is how the rest of the world saw the W3Cs actions at the time:
I wasn't there at the time, so maybe you are right that W3C reversed itself.
I can't tell if you are right from the articles you referenced. The
October 1 article talks about a proposal to W3C but it doesn't say that
this was ever endorsed by W3C. The February 26 article merely says that
the Oct 1 proposal was rejected.
====
http://web.archive.org/web/20020307130318/http://news.com.com/2100-1023-845023.html
...
The World Wide Web Consortium works with developers, software makers and
others to come up with standards for the Web. Generally those standards
either use publicly available technology or get the agreement of patent
holders not to enforce their patents.
But in a controversial proposal made public last fall, the consortium
debated whether to allow companies to charge royalty fees if their
technologies are used in a standard.
That proposal met with a firestorm of criticism, particularly from
devotees of the open-source and free software movements. In a reference
draft being published Tuesday, the W3C has moved back to the "royalty
free" standard.
...
=====
"Firestorm of criticism" is how I remember it too. Do you not see that
the same pattern is repeating now, in 2013, with DRM?
