AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...
"I've been silent for a long time. Life is funny - one minute you're trucking along, advocating Free Software, and the next you're being pulled in 4 different directions at once. Maybe I've been absent from running my site, but I'm still advocating Free Software. Just this past weekend I helped a lady whose previous vendor left her high and dry with her non-free software licenses.
Further evidence that those supporting software patents are front groups of giant corporations (seeking to tighten a monopoly) and patent lawyers who treat software patents as additional income
Patent advocates, large successful businesses, and politicians are so enthusiastic about the patenting of software that it’s hard to accept arguments from people like the FFII and Free Software Foundation who claim that the software industry simply does not need software patents and would be far better off without them.
Patents threaten every software developer, and the patent wars we have long feared have broken out. Software developers and software users – which in our society, is most people – need software to be free of patents.
"Last week, the Free Software Foundation announced an important new initiative called End Software Patents whose goals are pretty evident from the project's name. So far, the initiative is backed by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center [...] ESP can reach out farther than the FSF alone and build a coalition that can destroy software patents for the good of much more than the free software community..."
"After that introduction, I am sure many of you want to know about Free Software. But unfortunately that's not what I am supposed to speak about. In fact, this topic, software patents, is not very closely related to the issue of Free Software. Software patents are a danger that affect all programmers and all computer users.
KDE always stood for being free to do whatever you want. Surely that’s the philosophy of free software as a whole? If I want to use my machine to herd cats in my garden whilst terrorising them with a giant torch? However, today my objections to KDE 4 were met with an unbelievable barrier of closed-mindedness.
"...What means promoting Free Software through Free Culture? It means we need to start advertising the collaboration tools in our software. We have to enable and encourage artists to share their work with other artists and with the world - just as our programmers do..."