Private standards setting consortia are comprised of competitors in the marketplace. They cannot engage in price fixing or divide up the market among themselves without engaging in "a conspiracy in restraint of trade". Thus their licensing terms are legally required to be reasonable and non-discriminatory, i.e. RAND. Free beer is certainly the best deal for consumers when compared to inclusion of any royalty-bearing patent fees. The RAND licenses many companies offer permit totally unrestricted use of their IPR. I exchange they require complete reciprocity - totally unrestricted use of YOUR IPR. The GPL v. 2 simply isn't a RAND patent license.

The patent issue is sort of a red herring anyway. A copyright on a standard is just as bad as a patent. Only last year The Open Group and IEEE finally relented and gave the Linux man pages project permission to quote the POSIX standard verbatim. In a very celebrated old landmark case, Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, a unanimous US court found copyright infringement where no identifiable language had been copied at all (non-literal copying). USL v BSDi was based on pre-Berne works. We won't always get off by proving that industry software standards are public domain, unless we pass a law saying that they quickly pass into the public domain at some "tipping point". 120 years is too long. At least some of the claims in the SCO ABI letters to the UNIX licensees, and in the California Regents complaint against USL, were based upon mere copyright claims pertaining to widely used industry standards.

In fact I wonder if a private industry consortia could legally use the GPL or any copyleft license for a consensus standard without crossing swords with the DOJ and FTC antitrust regulators? In this regard the PRs are simply wrong when they complain that I'm quoting five year old e-mails about "the next version" of the GPL. That's how long Linus and everybody else has been waiting for the FSF rewrite. The next version is supposed to address "patent reciprocity".

The only free IBM patent license for some patented technology like RCU, and etc. was the GPL (and only the GPL). If you implemented a similar idea you had to release your code under the GPL in order to avail yourself of the IBM license or face the threat of a patent lawsuit. That meant you couldn't add any additional restrictions to your own software license. Reciprocity requires that you accept the other sides "take it or leave it offer" under those circumstances. This open letter is really sort of sour grapes response to that fact of life.

Another thing is the serial nature of this train wreck. The software patent problem can't be solved by the private standards consortia. They have no way of shielding you from a patent claim, since all patent holders are not a subset of their paying membership in the first place.

What the hell does the kernel have to do with the XMl format of a web service. That's the mist ridiculus thing I have ever heard in my entire life.

At the moment it might be difficult to see how XML-based web services might be embedded in the Linux kernel (or any kernel for that matter). However, that might change. Thinking off the top of my head, possibilities might include an open standard for communicating betrween embedded devices, or low-level message queueing between discrete processors (distributed grid computing?). Now, I suppose that you could have a layer above the kernel to handle any "proprietary" stuff, in the same way that you can do the same with device drivers. However, as with device drivers, there may be an (unacceptable) performance hit, which may be why you want stuff deep within the kernel.

What about a high performance distributed application running a number of communicating threads in parallel, but over a number of machines, each running a different operating system?

May be ridiculous, yes! But be sure that someone will think of a reason to do such a thing. We really don't know!  However, when they do, it really would be best if the standards were really "open" and not subject to any patents.

So, see this as not so much protecting what is hapenning now, as what might happen in the future.

Do I (in the UK) need a license for something patented in the US? Would you (in the US) need a license for something patented in the UK? What if a patent for the thing being patended was accepted in the US, but rejected in the UK?

Maybe this is why the big corporations are so keen for the EU to legitimise Software Patents (and thus harmonise with the US). The whole edifice may collapse is one trading block doesn't actually recognise that a license is needed.

It seems that OASIS are interested in "open" standards. However, an "open" standard isn't necessarily "free".

What we want are "free" standards. A working definition:

"An 'Open' Standard is also 'Free' if it can be implemented in code distributable under a 'Free' software license such as the GPL."

Perhaps we need a "Free Standards Group" (forked off from OASIS!?)

Now they have a bunch of XML schemas and DTD's and  for their recent standards.

I can't possibly explain the outrage I feel at the idea that descriptions of text strings and various usages can possibly be patentable.

To add insult to injury these standards are UN approved. I think (but am not certain) I've read that they have UN NGO standing.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/23/oasis_patent_policy/

Why is it that M$ are the only ones that are obviously in favour of software patents? Even those "Patents for Innovation" idiots are associated with M$ in some way.