[GNUz] Is there anyone out there?

[Martin Baehr]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 02:28:57PM +1300, Richard Tindall wrote:
> And Hi Martin, what's the view on software patents from over your way?

since software patents are not yet legalized (they are being granted,
but not enforcable) there is still hope that we are successfull at
keeping things the way they are.

> Hard to say what the eventual effect will be on our favourite OS; 
> gradual erosion? (of freedom to write drivers & file format readers, 
> comms protocols?, etc, in the coming future).

no, as soon as software patents are legal the big companies will sue
every competition out of existance. they can't do that yet because it
would warn europe off not to allow software patents. (that's my
prediction anyways)

since software can easely be created anywhere on this planet and then
sent anywhere else, for software patents to be truly effective they must
be enforcable worldwide so that we have no place to hide.

greetings, martin.
-- 
    offering experience: sTeam, caudium, pike, roxen and unix sysadmin
  doing: programming, training and administration. anywhere in the world
--
pike programmer   travelling and working in europe            open-steam.org
unix system-      bahai.or.at                       iaeste.(tuwien.ac|or).at
administrator     (stuts|black.linux-m68k).org                  is.schon.org
Martin Bähr       http://www.iaeste.or.at/~mbaehr/