summary of Re: Beyond 'open standard'

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Fri, 21 Jul 2006 13:05:44 +0100,
Alex Hudson wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2006-07-21 at 13:52 +0200, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> > At Thu, 20 Jul 2006 11:25:02 +0100,
> > Alex Hudson wrote:
> > > I guess you can say "RF-AND" (Royalty-free and non-discriminatory), as
> > > opposed to RAND, and people would figure out what you were saying.
> > 
> > Royalty-free is always non-discriminatory.
> 
> That really rather depends on your point of view; if RF was always
> non-discriminatory we probably wouldn't be even having this discussion.
> 
> If I have patents which cover standard X, and my licence is "You may
> implement my patents so long as you do not provide the source to your
> software", I think most here would consider that to be discriminatory
> against free software.
> 
> The fact that I don't charge for that license doesn't really come into
> it.
> 
> I agree that any requirement for royalty is probably the largest
> stumbling block, though.

If something is made available royalty-free, everybody is free to use
it. That's the only sensible definition of royalty-free. If only a
small or big group is able to use it without paying, it simply isn't
available royalty-free.

Jeroen Dekkers