[ILUG] Can any Irish SMEs come to the parliament to prevent SWPAT?

[Paul Jakma]

On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:

> need to have good and hard facts to back up what they say.  I'm 
> working on making a page of these.  Will email later.

Please do.

> This is winnable.

Hmm, it's worth fighting for, possibly.

> That could be the best way forward *if we lose this vote*.

Actually, I'm starting to think its the best way forward for 
Free/Open Source software full stop.

Suppose the EU also becomes a tangle of software patents in the 
future. Suppose, gradually, through licences like the CDDL[2] and 
(hopefully) the GPLv3[1] a "patent commons" is established. Can you 
think of any better incentive for FOSS than "Provide some protection 
against huge patent lawsuits" or "If we try sue project X, suddenly 
we wont be able to run OpenSolaris, Linux, Apache, whatever in our 
company"?

Look on the bright side..

1. Hopefully in the sense it will also have terms to start promoting 
"patent commons".

2. I work for Sun, but I would think it was a good licence (for what 
it aims to do) regardless.

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'.