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Stallman Unimpressed by Nokia Patent Pledge
Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is running a commentary by Richard Stallman on the recent PR blitz by Nokia concerning their promise not to enforce patent claims against the Linux kernel project. Stallman's take? "In effect, Nokia is lobbying the European Union to give Nokia and many others a new kind of weapon to shoot at software authors and users with--and telling the legislators, 'Don't worry, it's safe to let private armies carry these guns, because we promise that our gunmen won't shoot anyone in that building.'""
Some details at GROKLAW http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200505251 80125237 1 04251332&mode=print
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050530
A weapon doesn't have to be a gun. Patents are weapons in a struggle for economic dominance, both between companies, between countries and between systems (as in the traditionally closed-IP-driven industries vs. the Open Source movement). Therefore the analogy is quite valid (and much better than most analogies found on Slashdot).
It's not just about Open Source
Patent Trumps Copyright.
You have a nice application, say a web cart you have written.
Presently your code is protected by Copyright.
Patents trump copyright, under patents there will be only one Cart, only one One Click Shopping, only one conversion to XML possible.
This sells out everything owned by British, French and European Software developers to those who own patents, or will be awarded patents due to their pre-existing American Patents.
Liscensing Costs will become huge, progress will fall and be done only with permission.
This is about a Critiacal as it gets, if this passes it is all over,
Ludicrous patents will be issued, blanket cover all of ideas existing before implementations.
And without money for lawyers and spare cash to survive while you can't sell due to injuctions and the appeals progress drags on, so even oning a patent will not help. It is a system where only the richest survive.
All of this has occured in America and now Japan, soon it will be here unless we take Richard Stallamn very very seriously on this.
Alan Cox, the famous linux kernel guru, also had a comment on this matter a couple of days ago:6 38576
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=150685&cid=12
Imagine, if you will, a fiendish system that records your number plate and time at the start of your journey, and records the time when you arrive at your destination. If you have done the 120 miles between London and Bristol in anything less than the time it would take at 70mph, that means you've been speeding.
Only you don't have to imagine it. It's here.
Get your own free personal location tracker
A cross-compiler, and an editor on the system running the cross-compiler, and a shell on the system running the editor and the cross-compiler... see a pattern here?
Fact is, Stallman set out many years ago to make a Free OS. He worked hard on it, both coding himself, and getting others to help with it. He drove this idea for years. All that was lacking was a kernel, and that was being worked on. But Linus finished his kernel first, and Stallmans dream was now reality - a complete Free OS now available. Can you blame him for wanting a little credit? Can you blame him for wanting people using the OS he worked so hard for so many years to create to have a clue where it came from?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Never trust what a corporation says unless you get it in writing and notorised.
It's not "fiendish"; it's basic calculus.
The mean value theorem guarantees that if your average rate of speed on some stretch of road is over the speed limit (assuming the stretch of road has a uniform speed limit), there exists at least one point such that your instantaneous speed at that moment was the same as the average speed for your entire journey, which was over the limit. Logically, there exists probable cause that you travelled over the limit.