Patents versus Standards

From consortium.org, Oasis (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is modifying it's patent policy in good and interesting ways.  It continues to be a interesting discussion.  Formal standards exist to promote multiple implementations (as opposed to a proprietary specification that exists to encourage the use of a single implementation.)  Patents as opposed to standards exist to protect a single implementation.  These two bodies of policy/law serve different parts of the economic spectrum. 

The Consortium.org news feed is an excellent news tracker for this space. 

• OASIS
• The ZDnet article on OASIS