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...
Earlier on we mentioned the Europe-based Blender and recently we also mentioned Microsoft’s role in pushing for software patents in Europe, using ‘proxies’ as large as the United States government. You may be interested in the following perspective on the latest Blender story.
Yesterday we alerted about the latest attempt to shove software patents into Europe. It’s a back-door technique and Benjamin has more on this subject in the following slideshow. He has also been pointing to articles such as this one because Microsoft’s appeal in Europe, he believes, is more than it seems on the surface.
Various fronts, some of which associated/funded by Microsoft, are pushing for software patents in Europe using at least two back doors (harmonisation; Community Patent).
"...Contrast this to the development and release model in the GNU/Linux world. Take a popular distro like Ubuntu, for example. Every six months whatever nice improvements have been made in the last half year are packaged up into a new release and made available to the user community.
The growth of Free software cannot truly be measured. This is a marketing problem that we highlighted in the past, the focus being GNU/Linux. To shed some light on the growth of OpenOffice.org in Europe, consider the following new post.
Microsoft’s agreements with Linux vendors also happen to dispel “patent risk,” which to my mind is as illusory as ghosts given that the odds of Microsoft ever filing patents suits against Linux are virtually nil (huge risks down that path, given that patents can bite Microsoft as much as Linux…probably more so).
As the lobby for software patents in Europe intensifies, we identify and dissect the culprits. EUROPE is under attack at the moment. Lobbyists of firms like Microsoft - and in particular ACT - are trying to legalise software patents, thus marginalise Free software, and the Commission is not particularly helpful; it's almost playing along with the lobby, or playing right into its hands.
