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David Megginson wrote:
> When big, well-funded companies play the same game, though, it's
> reprehensible.
Amen. But the convicted felon Microsoft Corporation cynically pursuing this
patent is only the public face of that reprehensibility. Within our discussions
here on xml-dev and in the ongoing work of developing open standards and
software built upon those standards, the felon's betrayal of its own employees
and of those who give it the benefit of the doubt is even more personally and
more immediately reprehensible. What we do here is premised upon openness,
trust and ultimately upon our common conviction that the work is justified by
its benefit to all. All of us sacrifice or suspend our narrow parochial
interests to benefit from the expertise of the others and at least the hope of
greater symbiotic benefits. All of us, no less than any others the employees
and friends of the felon Microsoft, are bound to accept that "He who receives
an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who
lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas
should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and
mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point." The
felon's cynical filing for this patent (no doubt on prudent legal advice) is
the damning evidence of its disdain for us and for the premise on which we are
engaged in this work, and more particularly evidence of its treachery to the
good will and best intentions of its own employees and those who would take its
part.
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