Re: Neil's Newsforge article

Timothy R Butler writes:

> On Saturday 06 September 2003 02:05 pm, Tim Jansen wrote:
>> Here is a article about the Neil Stevens issue.
>>
>> http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/09/02/1930234.shtml?tid=51

>   That's a good piece... has anyone in KDE thought about creating a
> standardized policy?

I think the KDE policy is not to have too many policy's..

>   From the surface though, it would seem to me the patent protest is
>   quite different from Neil's credit. Afterall one affected only the
>   web site, the other was a change to the official code base...

I don't think that was the most important difference.  IMHO, there are
two differences between the two things:
1 Software patents are completely contrary to KDE's goals as an open
  source project, and the protest against it is widely supported in
  the community ( even Neil never questionned that swpats would be bad
  for free software, iirc ).  The subject of Neil's statement had
  nothing at all to do with KDE.
2 Neil's statement was flamebait.  It was only meant to raise
  controversy.  The KDE statement was meant as an honest attempt to
  fight swpats ( one can doubt the effectiveness, but at least the
  intention was good ), and was widely supported by the community.

>   The other point, I suppose, is virtually everyone I know has
>   problems with software patents, fewer (I'll leave it up to you to
>   decide if it is unfortunate or not), agree with Neil's (and to a
>   lesser extent, my) views on the American government and military.

That's only part of the point, see above.

cheers
domi

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