Re: [Patents] Large Industry Assocations for McCarthy + Program Claims

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> > Note that they claim so speak even in the name of "Europes fastest growing
> > 500 Opensource Companies", saying that allowing patent owners to ban
> > interoperable software, as secured by article 6 of the directive, is a way
> > of protecting open-source software and that preventing the patenting of
> > "pure business methods" is a way of preventing "american excesses".
>
> Wwat would be interesting is to know what are these
> "500 open-source companies" (are there really so much ?  8^)  ).
> I guess in their opinion Microsoft is an open-source
> company, through its "open 90% of the sources of Windows"
> propaganda program.

To find out more about these people, take a look at

        http://www.openforumeurope.org/
        
http://www.openforumeurope.org/press/2003/03/26/director_magazine_explodes_myths/

You can also write to Graham Taylor (see cc) whose signature is under this
joint statement for unlimited patentability and a ban on interoperable
software (contrary to the deceptive heading, allowing only "studying and
decompiling", but not publishing or use of interoperable software).

Even if you assume that Graham Taylor was misled here, I think this, if
true, is an unpardonable blunder which would mean the death of
openforumeurope.org, in case that organisation was ever alive.

On the pages of openforumeurope.org I find nothing about patents.  A
search with the word "patent" yields zero results.  The homepage is
very preoccupied with being pragmatic and unpolitical.  This is how you
sometimes end up if you try to ignore political aspects of what you are
doing.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
140,000 signatures against software patents          http://noepatents.org/