In case you haven't heard of late, the W3C group (standards body for the WWW) is proposing a change in how they will accept standards; in the past, any proposed standard must be fully open with no royalities due to patents or similar hooks. However, recently they have introduced the concept of RAND, Reasonable and Non-Discrimatory, licensing of standards. That is, a standard may be accepted even if it is covered by patents as long as the licensing fee is reasonable and does not discrimanate against the end-user.

As an example, the newest technology, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), while being pushed by groups such as Adobe and Apple, could easily be covered by patents by the same. If RAND was allowed, that means that anyone developing using SVG, and possibly end users of the SVG format, would have to pay the same fee (!= $0) to Adobe et al..

It shouldn't be too hard how this will affect perl, as well as the rest of the open-source world. If RAND does become a W3C policy, then there is no reasonable way to develop Perl modules that use these technologies, at least without paying some fee to some group. Remember, since it is non-discrimantory, you cannot distinquish between a commercial, closed-source project and a community, open-source project.

Because new technologies continue to drive the web forward, it is important that perl can continue to stay a strong contender; having to deal with licensing problems will drive many developer houses away from it and to a solution without licensing issues.

How can you help? (un)Fortunately, the period for comments that the W3C requested opened in mid-August and was to end on Sept 30; the events of last month along with several comments have prompted the W3C to extend the comment period to Oct 11th. Specifically, they are looking for comments on RAND wrt to recent questions, as outlined here. The full concept of RAND is covered here. The former link contains an email address in which you can send your comments to, and you should specifically address questions that they raise in this area. (And of course, the dot is covering this right now as well, so you can get some ideas for comments from there.)

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important