• To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Subject: Re: Facts to Support RAND? was: Re: more pate nt fun
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 13:53:04 -0800
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <p04330101ba4e231a7873@[192.168.254.4]>
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EEEACE28@h...> <3E283DB0.7020507@t...> <p04330101ba4e231a7873@[192.168.254.4]>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 9:30 AM -0800 1/17/03, Tim Bray wrote:
> 
>> The notion that you can make money by setting up a tollbooth on a 
>> piece of Web infrastructure (and thereby driving out all 
>> open-source/free offerings as a side-effect) is a radical proposal 
>> without even an existence proof.
> 
> 
> Would either Flash or RealAudio qualify as an existence proof? If not, 
> why not?

(a) I was talking about claiming patent rights on some basic 
nonproprietary protocol/format like HTTP/XML/HTML etc, and
(b) Last time I checked neither of those are profitable :)

If there were an existence proof, it would be GIF, but the amount Unisys 
raked in is trivial compared to the amount they've made selling 
computers to support web applications of one kind or another -Tim

• References:
  • RE: Facts to Support RAND? was: Re: more patent fun
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
  • Re: Facts to Support RAND? was: Re: more patent fun
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: Facts to Support RAND? was: Re: more pate nt fun
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>

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