Re: (Second) Last Call for XPointer 1.0

[Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>]

Daniel Veillard wrote:
>
>   Hi Eliotte,
>
> > I recommend complete rejection of this specification until such time as
> > Sun's patent can be dealt with more reasonably.
>
> Do you plan to reject use of Linking on the Web due to BT patent too ???
> If not what's so specific about this patent.
> As a Frenchmen I would rather reject all Patent crap which makes rich
> cororations of Lawyers and kill people trying to get a place under the
> Sun.
>
>   IMHO you're trying to fight the wrong problem. We just managed to learn
> about this patent. How many similar patent would IBM hold on other parts
> of XPointer that we simply didn't heard of ??? We can't chase them all
> and if we did we would make no progress every effort would be wasted
> doing those Patent lookups and fighting them :-(((

As I see it, the problem is much less that Sun has a probably unenforcable
patent, but rather that the W3C who has copyright on the XPointer spec, is
licensing its use under conditions that acknowledge Sun's patent.

This would be analogous to the W3C licensing use of HTML on condition that
users pay a royalty to BT.

-Jonathan