Patrick,
Regarding UOML IPR policy, although it is not royal free mode, it is
already maxium open under current condition.
1. It is royal free for all UOML applications, including all end users.
2. Only vendors who implement UOML need pay patent fee. There will be no
more than 10 companies need pay, occupy less than 1%. For the other
99.99%+, it is free.
3. The royal fee is charged by fix percentage. That means, no matter
there exists how many contributors, the royalty payments remain
unchanged . i.e. More contributors, same royalty payments. The patent
pool will distribute royal fee among the contributors.
4. Since the royal fee is charged by revenue percentage, the royalty
payment will be zero if the docbase software is freeware. Only the
vendor who want make money will be charged. 5. Currently, we can't give
up all IPR right now. UOML will break MS's monopolization, I can't
predict what kind of action MS will take to destroy it. I beleive MS
will try to "dirty" it in future. We must remain some weapon to cope
with it.
6. Compare with DVD, the IPR policy of UOML just like charging to
encoder only, free for every player. I think it is open enough in
current stage.
I beleive that holding some necessary IPR currently will help the
industry and the end users. We will open more in future if the open
model has been set up and the new industry is strong enough that the
monopolizer is unable to hurt it.
Regards
-Alex