The Web's leading standards body on Tuesday finalized a patent policy banning the use of most royalty-bearing technology in its technical recommendations, an issue that sparked a clash between open-source advocates and software makers.

The Royalty-Free Patent Policy, announced by the Patent Policy Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has changed little from a draft released eight weeks ago. In shutting fee-bearing patents out of standards development in all but exceptional cases, it marks a compromise between open-source advocates and proprietary software companies.