Software patents

[Jens Rehsack]

Todd Stephens wrote:
> On Friday 12 September 2003 06:05 am, Ruben de Groot wrote:
> 
> 
>>I think he was talking about putting a protest on the freebsd
>>website, like some linux distributions have done (eg
>>http://www.debian.org) This would be free, wouldn't it ?
> 
> 
> A large part of the reason of why I switched to FreeBSD from Linux was 
> the absence of the patent/license fanaticism you find in the Linux 
> community.  If this were a Linux mailing list, 3/4 of the messages 
> would be about the GPL and how MS is evil, while here we have nearly 
> all messages being oriented towards learning how to use and improve 
> FreeBSD.

Hm, I think our current problem with the software politic in europe
is a little bit more heavy than ms evil :-)

I don't know about america, but our politicans didn't have neither
any knowledge about software technology nor any idea about the
consequences of allowing patents for thinggies like amazon's
"One Click Buy" patent.

But - by the way - any interested german who had read www.heise.de
this week should had noticed that enough protests reached german
politicans to open their eyes to the real virtual world.

I can't believe other european countries missed that. So now is
definitively to late for any protest on freebsd.org - 12 month
earlier could had been a good idea (to wake up sleeping guys).
But at the moment all of them are informed and inform their
represants, too.

> I think the *BSD communities are comfortable enough in their positions 
> that they don't need to direct so much attention to themselves in that 
> way.

But if any algorithm used in bsd will be patented in europe and
the patent became valid, they may have a problem either.

Best,
Jens