The W3C Patent License

The World Wide Web Consortium was the first software industry standards organization to confront directly the problem of patent licenses for open source software. In May 2003, following several years of internal debate among W3C members (including representatives from all the major software companies and open source organizations), W3C published its patent policy. The effort was characterized by W3C director Tim Burners-Lee as “the most thorough ... to date in defining a basic patent policy for standard-setting.” (See www.w3.org.)

One of their major goals was to make W3C standards (what they call Recommendations) fully compatible with open source software.

As a condition for participating on a specific W3C standard-setting ...

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