Re: Charging the Charger

On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 13:46 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> [...] You just aren't going to beat this Holmes et cie. on general
> principles---you have to get into the nitty gritty of empirical SME
> economics, and that is going to be expensive and time-consuming.  This
> guy Holmes has done his homework, and done it well.  The fast track
> for OSS is going to be to show that the benefits to SMEs can be
> achieved _without_ patents [...]

European SME themselves have been polled about the issues. Of course
that doesn't count, that's not real economics, those SME entrepreneurs
don't know what they're talking about...

Laurent

http://wiki.ffii.org/Ifis050404En
<<
[...]
A partial evaluation showed last month that the study revealed nearly
unanimous animosity against software patents among German companies in
the ICT sector, based on fairly detailed knowledge of the problems. The
full publication of the results from all 1200 participants confirmed
this picture. A study about Interoperability/Patent protection and
Competition recommends improvements with regard to Article 6a.
[...]
On a scale of -3 to 3 "How will software patents influence the
innovation ability of your company" scored -1.5 (negative influence, 94%
of interviewees responding), and "Do software patents have supporting or
inhibiting effects on your programming activities now or in the future?"
scored -2.58 (inhibiting, 97.12% of respondents). "How do software
patents affect the calculation of product prices?" ranked 2.45 (higher
prices, 96.62% responding). "How much use for you has the know-how gain
by the publication of the software patents by third parties?" scored
-2.41 (no practical use, 89.30% responding).
>>

http://wiki.ffii.org/SiEconom0503En
<<
2005-04-20 -- The Student Organisation of the University of Ljubljana
(SOU) has performed the first study ever on software patents in
Slovenia. They sent a questionnaire to the members of the Chamber of
Commerce and Industry of Slovenia (GZS) asking them whether they agree
with the association's push for software patents, on which the
government's support for the software patents directive is based. The
results show that the Slovenian IT industry overwhelmingly opposes
software patents.
[...]
By 31 March 2005, they had received 229 answers. Of the companies that
answered,

      * 40 (19%) were not informed enough to take a decision
      * 183 (79%) were against software patents
      * 6 (2%) were in favour.
>>

Also Europe's largest SME associations UEAPME (11 millions SME and 50
millions employees) and CEAPME strongly oppose software patents:
http://wiki.ffii.org/Ueapme050427En