If the licence fees for ’standards’ are greater than the usage cost for using a proprietary systems which does the same thing (‘accesible’ systems rather than common standards) the value of having a common standard rather goes out of the window.

…but, but, but they are not really ‘predators’ – the reason western industry looks to licence income to a greater and greater extent is because their income from manufacturing itself continues to diminish, as goods are manufactured in developing countries …so they have to find some other way to compensate and pay costs and salaries.

Alas for them, imposing high licence fees will discourage standards use a a technology, so this is something of a catch 22 situation, the heart of which is finding a viable ‘business plan’ for western industry.

Do you agree?

Standardisation drives costs down allowing new great technological enablers to become available for the masses in an affordable way IF it is not impeded by predatory and complex -read: recurring or usage based – licensing fees. I hope the global economical downturn will make those predators revisit their strategy from a ‘zero times huge license fee equals zero revenue’ to ‘many very little license fees equals a decent revenue’.