Fwd: Alan Cox: It's about business, national security, and safety

[James Heald <j.heald@ucl.ac.uk>]

Fwd of an email from Alan Cox, making some interesting points:
---

On Llu, 2003-06-23 at 23:33, Ian Clarke wrote:
> I am still concerned that making this about software patents being a 
> threat to Open Source, rather than the reality which is that they are a 
> threat to almost all European software developers, does more to 
> obfuscate the issue, and makes it easier for pro-sp people to argue that 
> since Open Source software is largely non-revenue generating, that there 
> will be no economic impact (of course we know this is absolutely 
> misguided, but many MEPs will be susceptible to that argument).

It isnt an open source issue, its a business issue, a national security 
issue and a safety issue.


Its a business issue because you need to be the size of Dyson to use
patent
law and survive (and Dyson nearly went out of business). There are
basically
no EU software companies that big except the multinationals

Its all of the issues because of its economic effect. Currently lots of 
non UK software is maintained by UK engineers/support and we actually
get
an awful lot of the revenue stream adding features, tuning etc most of
it
by smaller businesses who the patent laws will strange.

The worst of all is what is happening in hardware will happen to
software, 
right now it goes like this

        US/EU company has an idea
        If they enforce the patent they will get countersued
        They don't want to be sued back
        So lets not make anything

        Licenses patent to "independent" Chinese company for small
royalty
                [small because China is a better tax haven]

        Chinese company makes a zillion boxes
        
        An "independent" importing company ships them into the US/EU
        Two years later they get sued - for patents, safety whatever
        They don't have much money (its all in china buying hw)
        They fold
        The patent lawsuit/liability lawsuit is never paid

        Repeat from stage 1 with next project

US liability law is actually one reason why the worlds infrastructure
now
depends on tiny little boxes full of software that was written in
potentially
hostile countries using crypto that probably has Chinese backdoors (we
know the
US stuff has had US back doors and EU stuff EU backdoors so this kind of
seems a reasonable assumption)