Slashdot Mirror
Elect NoSoftwarePatents as European Of The Year
Aargh writes "Every year a public Internet poll is taken to vote for, amongst others, the "European of the Year". This year, the founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com has been selected as a candidate. Taken from the NoSoftwarePatents.com site: "We now have a first-rate opportunity to make political leaders, media and citizens all over the world realize the significance of our cause. Please give us your vote, and help us gain more votes, so that the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign be elected as the new 'European of the Year'." Non-europeans can also vote, so why dont we unleash the slashdot hordes?" Mr. Mueller had been exchanging e-mails recently on this subject; thanks to an introduction from Kaj Arnö. I truly do think that given his, and the organization's work that they deserve to win. Check out the celebrity endorsements as well. *grin* Also, worth reading their voting guide if you are going to vote.
I'll just do what slashdot tells me to and vote anyway!1!
As the voting form requires to vote for all categories it is not a good thing to do this if you have no clue who all these people are. Even I, as a overaddict news consuming European, have no clue what to choose for most of the categories because here in Europe news sources are mostly nation minded and therefore very fragmented.
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
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If you took the time to actually read the voting recommendations, you'll see that some of the proposed candidates are actually generated at random. actually encouraging to pick one of your own choice. but helpful for the decision impaired.
You know, thsi reminds me of old joke...
:P
School teachear giving homework: "children, please write who's your idol, and why Lenin"
Luckily the background isn't the same
One that hath name thou can not otter
please read their recommandations on their voting guide. The recommandations are sensible and argumented, and when they don't want to choose (business leader of the year) they generate a random choice. I found it quite funny.
The issue is important.
Astroturfing is when you *fake* a grassroots campaign, by, say, having your paid employees pretend to be consumers, or having setting up lots of pseudonyms on a web forum in order that one person pretends to be 20 disgruntled/satisfied customers or whatever.
In this case, we're a bunch of geeks who are being urged to vote for someone who most of us probably happen to agree with.
Organising a campaign isn't the same as faking a campaign.
The kind of idiocy written by those in favour of software patents has nothing to do with block votes. It has to do with money, lots and lots of money, and the surprising effect this has on "journalists". Calling the FFII "communists" is a strange attack but then you have to realise that the author is Polish, and the Polish MEPs were one of the most single-minded blocks to vote against software patents.
Software patents are being pushed hard by a rich, powerful, and ammoral machine built from lawyers, lobbyists, and large misguided software firms that have been beguiled by the arms race.
Voting for Florian will send a strong signal that software patents are not a popular legal innovation but are rightly seen as a threat to the free market and open capitalism.
My blog
The more sophisticated amoung us see the issue of software patents as one of the artificial creation of monopolies and the unneccessary restriction of freedom, but from the pure propertarian perspective, this can look a lot like the slogan "property is theft". Lawyers know how complex a concept property is, but the average person, and it seems the average politician doesn't know this, and hear opposition as simple "rationalisation".
Wikileaks, no DNS
It's true that the Polish government was extremely helpful. However, the Polish candidate for Statesman of the Year wasn't helpful at all. He's the president, but all of the help came from the executive government, which is headed by the prime minister (at the time that was Marek Belka), and mostly from deputy minister Wlodzimierz Marcinski. We discussed the voting recommendations with our Polish activists who are quite familiar with how the decisions were taken within the Polish government.
Let's all be good little Asimov robots and obey the leader, er, Slashdot. I, for one, welcome our new moderator overlords...
As for Hirsi Ali's party, the VVD pushed for software patents like hardly any other political party in Europe. The whole directive project was started by Frits Bolkestein. On 1 July 2004, all of the Dutch parliament except for the VVD group supported a resolution that the Dutch government should retract its support to the EU Council's pro-patent proposal. And Toine Manders was a driving pro-patent force in the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe) group in the Europan Parliament. It was only toward the end of the process that he was burned out and (probably because Philips also wanted this) introduced a motion for rejection of the entire bill. On the day before the vote, I met him in an elevator in the European Parliament and we actually had a friendly discussion because we all wanted to go for rejection of the proposal, but let's face it: He's an intellectual property lawyer by profession, and he didn't call for rejection because he was against software patents. He just realized that his camp couldn't get its way, and then they decided to abort the process, which was perfectly fine with me.
Proponents of software patents have been claiming for years the whole system can be fixed by just making a few adjustments, but no one has been able to actually argue in economic terms that this is in fact true. And then there's still these pesky details such as the WTO TRIPs treaty, which requires a minimum duration of 17 years for all patents you grant.
We're not chucking anything, we're preventing the codification of the American system in Europe.Donate free food here
Claiming that I returned when we were on the winning track is the opposite of what happened. On June 20, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament voted on the software patent directive, and many essential amendments to the proposed bill (in order to exclude software from the scope of patentable subject matter) fell through. When the members of the committee voted at the end whether the parliament should accept or reject the bill (accepting meaning that it would still have gone back to the EU Council and possibly to conciliation), 16 voted for and only 10 against the proposal.
In that precarious situation, a group of companies actually did provide the kind of support that I became involved again for the last two weeks before the plenary vote. Like in almost all parliaments, it's the plenary that takes the actual decision, and the committee sort of prepares the plenary vote (in some parliaments, if the committee decides in a certain way, it's practically a done deal because people in the plenary just take the official party position, but in the European Parliament, the plenary may still decide differently).
I didn't position myself as the leader of our movement in the European Parliament at that stage. I took some initiatives and met various politicians and aides, and the FFII was really in charge.
Someone is not a "glory hog" because several independent juries nominate him for certain awards and honors. There's some information on those awards and honors toward the bottom of my backgrounder page on the NoSoftwarePatents.com site, and especially about how I personally view those nominations. I also explained that at great length in an email that the FFII sent out to all of its registered supporters.