Re: the posting just delivered on XML-DEV

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Len,

Thanks for clarifying what you say is your
"fundamental position," viz., "that the
arguments offered by Lessing and the W3C
are not persuasive" with respect to patents
and open standards...
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This represents an email message sent on
May 11th when response was relevant, but DNS problems
apparently prevented the message being sent.  Meantime,
I composed a corrected/updated version of the posting
(which still has not been delivered), and other
interesting comment on the patent topic has
been supplied by Rick Jelliffe.

Also meantime (offline), Len aka Claude has been
educating me in detail about the raj, and
working within the system for political
change rather than confronting it.  I think the
patent system is rather more broken than he
seems to think, but I take his point into
serious consideration.

I have therefore re-written the initial portions
of the document at

http://xml.coverpages.org/patents.html

trying to incorporate Len's advice.  It still
fails, no doubt, but perhaps it's better.

This will be an interesting story as it unfolds.

Robin Cover