RE: [xml-dev] Cutting special deals for open source developers --noway!

[Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@softwareag.com>]

At 10:10 AM 10/16/2001 -0700, Benjamin Franz wrote:
>On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> > Of course, we will have patents related to *efficient* implementation of
> > XQuery. The open cooperation is on the definition of the language itself,
> > and it must be possible to do a naive implementation without violating any
> > patents.
>
>Yargh.
>
>That just raised the evil specter of a (hypothetical) design that can be
>implemented with exponential run time for free and polynomial or better
>run time _only_ via patent encumbered algorithms.

True, but if the WG members have any sense at all, they are making sure 
that things are implementable. Also, the W3C puts a lot of value on 
multiple independent implementations as a way of showing that a spec really 
is implementable.

I may be myopic, but I would think that any Query Language that was legally 
encumbered so as to bar people from having smart storage and retrieval 
strategies that might be trade secrets or patented would be a very hard 
sell for major vendors.

Jonathan