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

[David GLAUDE Mailing <dglaudemailing@gmx.net>]

Xavi Drudis Ferran wrote:
> 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. 

But we have to be carefull.

Because if a government ask for compliance to a standard that require 
non-free licence to use a patent to be implemented.
Then it is unfair to Free Software answer.

So compliance to standard is fair if the standard is "Open". It is 
unfair otherwise.

More than the compliance to standard, government should ask for software 
build for them or software they use/aquire to be Free Software.

David GLAUDE

PS: Reverse way Microsoft could call it unfair for a governement to 
require the software they acquire to be Free Software. But in fact even 
Microsoft is capable of making Free Software, they are just not willing 
too. ;-)

--
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http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html.