Slashdot Mirror
On Software Patent Lawsuits Against OSS
Bruce Perens writes "We've warned you for a decade. Now the monster has finally arrived: patent holders are filing suit against OSS developers." From the article: "We should not be confident that we will continue to have the right to use and develop Open Source software. A coordinated patent attack by a few companies, or even one large company, could completely destroy Open Source in the United States and cripple it in other nations. Funds and patent portfolios that have been established to help defend Open Source would not be sufficient to defend it. Only legislative changes to the patent system can fully protect Open Source and maintain it as a viable source of innovation for our future."
The only thing that can destroy Open Source is if people stop writing Open Source Software.
Which they will if they get sued into oblivion.
TW
It's a theory of mine that linking to a reputable site, such as Wikipedia will get any post modded informative, even if the link is completely irrelevant.
Badass Resumes
Just days before the European Commission's next hearing on patent policy that is still being hatched despite the last directive's overwhelming defeat in Parliament, several recent publications discuss developments of the law on Tux' home continent, and successful steps to avert software patents: The huge new book on "The War over Software Patents in the European Union" by the founder of NoSoftwarePatents has just been released for download. If you prefer a few hundred pages less, see the latest issue of the International Journal of Law and Information Technology for a scholarly article.
>The closest we have come to having no voting rights was the last predential ellection, where the liberal parts of Ohio had far too few voting booths
Closer than that: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=385 . Pick a largely African-American district near a military base. Do a mass mailing there. Mark the envelopes "Do not forward". Collect the bounces from the addresses of African-Americans who are in Iraq. Build a spreadsheet of them. You now have the ability to walk into the election offices and say that everyone on the list doesn't really live at their registered address. If the would-be Democratic voter walks into a polling station, they can still fill out a provisional ballot. If still overseas, their absentee ballot will be treated as invalid and simply not counted.
You also have no voting rights if someone opaquely controls the counting of the votes.
It's a theory of mine that linking to a reputable site, such as Wikipedia will get any post modded informative, even if the link is completely irrelevant.
You may be right.
Chicken (gallus gallus domesticus).
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.