Re: [Patents] Re: IBM, Microsoft, BEA Snub W3C

[Xavi Drudis Ferran <xdrudis@tinet.org>]

El Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 12:38:53PM +0100, iriXx deia:
> 
> >Protesting against those who have economical interest in destroying their 
> >market (by monopolising it) and no obligation to listen to protesters 
> >is wasting time compared with protesting to elected legislators and 
> >publicizing the issues.
> 
> maybe, but what can we actually do about this monopoly? it is quite a 
> concern - given that IBM and Microsoft have patented much of the ebXML 
> technology. shades of the Sun vs MS Java story... when one player has 
> enough power over the market, whatever they introduce will become a 
> de-facto 'standard' regardless of W3C, as Microsoft have already proved 
> by distorting W3C standards in Explorer.
> 
> what is the best way to protest against this sort of behaviour? i 
> believe Sun treated it as antitrust, but antitrust trials are risky and 
> expensive. perhaps lobbying for *implementation* of W3C standards is a 
> way forward?
>

One way is informing the public and, yes another would be demanding 
normalization 
in government contracts (just the same as when you demand that sheets of paper
should be DIN A4 you could demand that a web application has to produce valid
XHTML 1.0 Transitional pages, or something like that, and I don't think it is 
too radical that the government also demands adherence to standards for 
communications
from citizens, but that is slightly less clear). 

But my point was that at least it must be demanded that law enforced 
monopolies
of 20 years are not imposed on us. We have enough monopolies with the ones 
resulting
from network effects. 


-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis@tinet.org