Re: Software-Patents

Enrico Weigelt <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.multimedia.media-api
Message-ID <[email protected]>
* Steve Lhomme <[email protected]> [2004-01-09 17:27:41 +0100]:

Hi,

<snip>
> If you look at the Xiph example, you'll see that they have minored their 
> claim of being patent-free. Because to do that it requires a lot of 
> money and time to investigate on existing patents, or voiding some with 
> prior art. It is simply impossible for a (small to medium) open source 
> project to know all patents and get around them. 

100% ACK.

> So my point is "ignore it".
No. Such an ignoreance doesn't help enything. We have to fight against that!
In Europe, software patentes are still illegal (at the moment). There
are lobbys who want to change this.

We _MUST_ stop them, or evrything else will be meaningless.
Every opensource project is encouraged to evrything possible against
the legalization of software patents!

http://patinfo.ffii.org/

Every developer, planner and user has to be informed about the problem
and urged to fight against this. For example every project site should
have a big fat warning message, also all applications should print 
out big fat warnings. So at least everyone who copes with opensource
software cannot get around being informed.


cu
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