[gjsman-1000]

> I guess my feeling is that if you want to make it a standard, it should be unencumbered by patents, paywalls, and NDAs. Otherwise how can you expect me to implement the standard?

Well, when you are developing a standard, there is no guarantee that every person who owns a patent will reveal themselves. There’s no guarantee your due diligence will find them all either. You could develop a completely open standard, someone announces they’ve got a patent, and if they win in court, that’s the end of it being an open standard.

> These companies often make these advancements because it's beneficial to their bottom line, because they can utilize fewer resources or provide a better product to their customers.

That’s just called business. That’s not evil, and if Linux didn’t benefit their bottom line, it would not be usable today (considering over 90% of contributions are from the big evil companies).