Re: (Second) Last Call for XPointer 1.0

[Daniel Veillard <Daniel.Veillard@imag.fr>]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 10:49:41AM -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> Frankly, it may be a case as Trafford says where 
> the industry ignores the patent rather than going 
> to the trouble and expense of contesting it. The 
> W3C may not be able to ignore it.  The result is 
> the same:  XPointer is DOA.

  Why should W3C differ from the industry in this
case ? If everybody consider the claim invalid,
why should it be W3C which would go through the
expensive action of fighting it if the patent itself
if moot ?

> The next problem would be, can everyone live with 
> ignoring XPointer or Sun or both?

  As a free software implementor, I read Sun's terms
and while I disagree with the fact that they were granted
this patent, their condition were fine by me. It is
very clear that they cannot sue me for my libxml XPointer
implementation.
  You may have others needs, but for XPointer implementation
itself the term emitted by sun were fine. What point is
blocking you ?

  Now, if you want to implement something different than
XPointer you may have issues with Sun's patent, but this
must not block XPointer, right ?

  Now one third way would be to have a legal advice on
whether the patent would *actually* cover any XML resource.
The wording excerpt which was propagated here clearly stated
that the claim was linked to HTML usage. And XPointer do not
target HTML, so is this whole story moot because it's a non
problem ?

  Is defining a fragment identifier syntax able to locate
string in a markup based resource something we have to forget
about until this Patent expires ? If this is the conclusion of
this discussion, this is depressing !!! (and sorry there is
*no* excuses to the current policy of the Patent Office,
as Alan Cox puts it:
  "Selling Monopoly right to Common Sense for 25 Years"
http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/geekgod-cox-largeview.jpg ).

Daniel

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