[Patents] Re: World Intellectual Property Day is April 26, 2001

[orre@nada.kth.se (Roland Orre) (Roland Orre)]

Roland says:
Somebody calling itself "l b <pubs@linuxwaves.com>" obviously has
unsubscribed to some list by telling us:
> Mr. Pilch,
> 
> I have unsubscribed from this list.
> 
> Good luck with your pissing contest.

Roland continues:
As this person obviously used "BCC" or some other anonymous way of
forwarding the list, whichever it was, I got the message from somewhere,
I forward this reply to patents@liberte.aful.org and some of the
other lists which I found to be the most likely recipients, from my own
perspective.

I think it is a good advice to anyone speaking in circumstances like
these that they sign whatever they write with their full name if
it's not obvious from their mail signature who they are.

Any person can think that something expressed by some other person
maybe be stupid, limited, greedy, threathening, dangearous or whatever.
Irony, which I think Mr Pilch expressed earlier, considering measuring
"technical height" may be misunderstood for instance, as irony is very
context dependent.

To keep a sane debate, especially on mailing lists and usenet, I see it
very important that we stick to being persons, representing who we are
and what we stand for.

Anonymous chat lists and such certainly fill some needs for some people
but to make mailing lists a serious debate forum it is essential that
we never forget that we are persons speaking with persons. Mailing
lists have a tendency to make people act more extreme and emotional.

For my own I was debating on a mailing list for a local association 
here one year ago and the cashier there, one time said something bad
about open-source in a very similar provocative style as Mr Smith.
I simply told this person that he will regret this. Later on this person
said something similar but this time even offending. I calmly said that I
don't want to be a member of an association where someone in the board
can express themselves in this way. The person quit, and later on sold his
company as well, and the association was almost extinct for a while as
we had been running on his servers..

Considering Mr Smith I'm very surprised when I heard that he is a famous
writer in a pro software patent magazine. Then I would not expect such
immature offending statements which he had expressed (almost anonymously)
in his mail (but later heard that he have had on his now removed web pages
as well, which of course is OK as long as he can stand for them).

Anyway, I've been working with logics and math for 20 years and I've found
that 
     * the idea about software patents is based upon contradictions

I will later prove that more formally, also with a more thorough explanation
why this is a threat to the whole world.

I want a free world based upon fair business and competition which is
based upon skills and not upon monopoly.

I don't believe in the so called intellectual property and business based
upon this myth, will either fail or be harmful.

A system which is based upon contradictions will not be stable.

Apart from being based upon contradiction, patenting software is from
my perspective insane and will lead to terrible consequences in the long
run. I will elaborate more on this later.

        Roland Orre
        Professional software developer
        Towards a free world without monopolies

PS. I actually have a patent since 12 years considering a method for storing
certain types of information in artificial intelligence systems, but at
that time I did not understood better and was persuaded by my employer.
Sorry for that...