Re: [Fsfe-uk] OASIS standards to be RAND?

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 11:08 +0000, Stuart Yeates wrote:
> No standards agencies have the power to ensure that standards are
> unencumbered by patents. The best they can do is ensure that the
> participants in the standardisation process do not encumber the
> standards. The cause of the problem is not the standards agencies
> but software patents.

Well, yes and no. Yes, they don't have any power over anyone other than
the vendors participating in the process (limited power, at best). But,
they can still avoid non-vendor patents which they are aware of.

(Of course, if they're not aware of the patent, you can't really ask
anything of them).

OASIS could be doing a lot more to ensure their standards are
implementable by free software. A RAND policy means that they
essentially don't want to think about patents too hard, other than to
ensure that no-one is making more bucks out of the standard than they
feel right.

Cheers,

Alex.