W3C—Maintains royalty-free patent policy ensuring all web standards can be freely implemented by anyone
Since its founding in 1994, W3C has maintained a royalty-free patent policy requiring all W3C Recommendations (standards) to be implementable without licensing fees. This policy ensures HTML, CSS, accessibility guidelines, and other core web standards can be freely used by anyone, preventing vendor lock-in and fragmentation of the web.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Internet & Web Freedom | +toward | primary | +1.00 |
| Open Source | +toward | primary | +1.00 |
| Overall incident score = | +0.885 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (high ×1.5) × confidence (0.59)
Evidence (1 signal)
Maintains royalty-free patent policy ensuring all web standards can be freely implemented by anyone
Since its founding in 1994, W3C has maintained a royalty-free patent policy requiring all W3C Recommendations (standards) to be implementable without licensing fees. This policy ensures HTML, CSS, accessibility guidelines, and other core web standards can be freely used by anyone, preventing vendor lock-in and fragmentation of the web.