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RE: Re: W3C ridiculous new policy on patents

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: Amy Lewis <amyzing@t...>
• Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 08:06:07 -0500

Not naivete.  I don't keep up with the open 
source projects with the exception of VRML/X3D 
and that only by reading that mail list.  I 
don't know which have been shut down or 
what patents were enforced.

If projects are shut down due to enforcement, 
that emphasizes why a patent policy is necessary, 
and why it should be flexible.  Underfunding 
is not an excuse to break the law any more 
than lack of knowledge is a reason for any 
group to get a patent.  

One might want to dig a little deeper into 
the subject of software patents to uncover 
what values make one defensible and another 
not.  Sun gets to keep the patent that affects 
XPointer despite the obvious prior art because 
no one is willing to pay the money to take 
them on and because they granted RF RAND.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Amy Lewis [mailto:amyzing@t...]
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 6:27 PM
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len)
Cc: David Brownell; Jeff Lowery; xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  Re: W3C ridiculous new policy on patents


On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 03:28:28PM -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>Patents are a fact of life and law.  We have to 
>deal with it.   I have to wonder whether or 
>not open source implementations are violating 
>any existing patents and if so, who gets nailed.

Is this deliberate naivete?  A number of "hot" open source projects
have been shut down due to enforcement of patents ... sometimes patents
that are defensible, but more often, since most software patents are
indefensible on their faces, not.

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