Slashdot Mirror

...or so they say. In fact, many European politicians do know that allowing software patents and business method patents inevitably leads to countless trivial patents.

You wouldn't believe it, but here is what the Directive's proponents have admitted themselves:
"Arlene McCarthy, chair of the legal affairs committee, said earlier this month she was not prepared to consider any proposals for amendments that do not acknowledge the patentability of software."

In other words, they do want to conjure up a legal framework which scares even IT industry giants such as SAP, and not just small and medium enterprises, open-source advocates, academics and initiatives such as Attac that are of little importance to those prepared to discard or ignore any arguments made from what is just "the commie corner" in their view of the world.
(P.S.: I am posting the google links rather than the direct URLs, for as of this writing, FFII.org itself seems to be unreachable, at this crucial moment in time...)

The plenary vote on the new patents directive will be held within a few days, so please do contact some Members of the European Parliament (rather not just by eMail) right now and tell them that the introduction of software patents is a mistake their voters will never forget, no matter whether it is made knowingly nor out of ignorance.

Moreover, there is no need to rush to precedential judgment now, only weeks before the World Summit on the Information Society, which (according to proposals such as these) may well turn on its head overreaching IP laws.

Interesting how the BBC and now the FT puts publishes articles on Open Source and Linux's increasing popularity. Are they going for the Slashdot hits I wonder?

There's also this on the BBC today:
Life looks good for
Linux

Whereas the Guardian

(a Liberal paper?)

and the UK's Computer Weekly

continues to use the shall we say 'not the biggest open source fan in the world' Jack Schofield as a technology writer.

I believe someone posted something about him a few months ago. If you find and read his previous articles, you'll see what I mean.

Whilst this sounds very nice, I feel that I should bring everyone back into the cold harsh reality by pointing about that the UK has a long long way to go before it becomes more open source savvy.

For example, the NHS, possibly the most underfunded thing we have, just coughed up £60 million for Microsoft Licencing.

Money well spent? You decide.

Quoting from the article: "However when an employee takes source code, or a company removes protection from a demo version of software and sells it as its own product, it certainly feels like theft, but technically it is not stealing. The case of Oxford v Morris held that software was not property and copying it was not stealing for the purpose of the Theft Act. However it is copyright infringement."

You may well not agree with other points in this article, such as the need to criminalise circumvention, as software publishers are too poor to bring their own court case.

But let's not further devalue the language, by calling copyright infringement by incorrect emotive words such as theft and piracy.

Why you listen to anything that this guys says.

If he isn't being paid by M$ he should be. Read his other articles...

A hard sell for cuddly new XP

The mother of all operating systems

Sun sues Microsoft from inside a glass house

To name a few ... I don't think you'll find a bad word said about Microsoft. Nice to know.

Anyway, I assume they lifted the ban just until they have had time to develop the system so that it is a bit harder to go around it. We might see the blockings again within a few weeks.

the link above just goes to front of a tech section, here's a direct link to the story
http://www.cw360.com/bin/bladerunner?REQUNIQ=10313 25075&REQSESS=HM5797&REQHOST=site1&REQAUTH=2313828 &2131REQEVENT=&CARTI=115571&CCAT=1&CCHAN=13&CFLAV= 1

The UK based trade paper, Computer weekly has been tracking this project for quite some time now..

Check out the recent article here