WAP: Life Or Death?
By Brad Smith
The Great WAP War may be over just as it was starting to get interesting. Then again, maybe the salvos have only begun.
There was a storm of protest in several quarters when Geoworks Corp. announced Jan. 19 it was going to charge license fees
to use its patented Wireless Application Protocol technology.
Some analysts speculated that what Geoworks was doing was the probable death knell for the wireless data technology. Some
members of the WAP Forum decried the decision as shortsighted. And Geoworks already is trying to sugar-coat its intentions,
saying it never wanted to dampen the future of WAP services and products. But whether or not that holds water with WAP
leaders will be hashed out at a forum meeting in Rome on Feb. 8.
Geoworks says it will charge a $20,000 annual license fee for application companies with more than $1 million in revenue that
use its WAP technology. It will charge a similar fee to WAP platform developers, plus a royalty of $1 per subscriber.
Geoworks maintains the fees are allowed under the WAP Forum's "fair and reasonable" guidelines and says it will consider
waiving fees for small developers.
After Geoworks announced the plan, developer message boards on the Internet immediately lit up like a Las Vegas casino.
One WAP developer who runs the WAPWarp.com mailing list, Stephen Cook, posted an open letter to Geoworks asking if
the potential negative effects of the license fees on WAP were worth the potential economic gains for the California wireless
data company.
"I am sure you will realize that such questions are of great interest to a developer community who even now are probably
wondering whether their decision to invest in WAP as a technology was a wise one," Cook wrote. "I feel that your licensing
terms will damage the growth of WAP as a standard."
Ben Linder, marketing vice president for WAP Forum founder Phone.com Inc., says it was an "unfortunate and shortsighted"
decision by Geoworks to even say it might charge WAP developers. Linder says Geoworks picked on the weakest player in
the WAP chainthe developer and that the fee announcement runs against the unfettered spirit of the Internet itself.
Linder vowed that the WAP Forum will make sure developers are not charged, while saying that license fees for patents are
normal for use of intellectual property rights by non-developers such as handset and infrastructure manufacturers. That's
potentially lucrative in itself because nearly every handset manufacturer plans a WAP phone and carriers need a WAP server.
Some other WAP IPR license-holders, including Nokia and NEC Corp., say they are studying the licensing issue and will
follow the WAP Forum guidelines. Nokia was only surprised that Geoworks made its position so public. NEC, which owns
three of its own IPRs, says it hasn't decided if it will license the Geoworks technology.
Geoworks, which saw its stock (GWRX on the Nasdaq) climb from $16.56 per share to $53 over a three-day period before
settling back to about $30, insists it made the IPR announcement public because many WAP developers are not members of
the WAP Forum and wouldn't know about licensing through normal channels. The company denied it issued the press release
to drive up its stock price.
Donald Ezzell, COO of Geoworks, also says the company's position will encourage and not stall WAP. Although admitting that
the company's announcement might have been less than clear about developer fees, Ezzell insists "virtually all" developers would
pay only a $25 processing fee.
Whether or not that assurance salves the hurt feelings of developers remains to be seen, especially because Geoworks insists
that its patent is an essential part not only of the WAP standard but also of the broader wireless markup language. Some
developers blanch at the idea they would need the approval of Geoworks simply to write code. What would have happened to
the expansion of the Internet, they ask, if Web developers had to get special permission to use its hypertext markup language?
Answers to those questions may depend on whether the sides reach an armistice over fees or go on fighting. In that sense, the
engraver may as well refrain from chiseling R.I.P. into the WAP headstone just yet.
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