As a developer, user, manager or in any other way related to mmbase please take the time
To follow some of these links and read/listen to them. Try to ignore all the techno talk and see what is happening. If you don't want to wonder In 20 years why when and how we lost the right to freespeech and creating tools to better ourselves it might be a good idea to get involved. Now I know 'freespeech' sounds over the top but what use is free speech in 2004 if you can't email, msn, publish online your ideas because they are blocked by patents and you are only allowed to talk when asked and licensed. Ask your local programmer/developer what this means for his work. I personally am 100% convinced that if these laws where created in 1960 instead of today we would not have the Internet today as it is, no email, no websites. Yet media will not even pick up this today they are busy mailing their workers, creating websites, making new mailinglists, updating their portals...
Now I can see you thinking what is he talking about ? : let me quote someone else that might make more sense from the ffii.org site :
(url : http://swpat.ffii.org/news/04/cons0507/)
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EU Council To Scrap Parliamentary Vote without Discussion
2004/05/07
For immediate Release
The EU Council of Ministers is demonstrating that the concept of democracy is alien to the EU. This wednesday, the Irish Presidency managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents directive, with only a few countries - including Belgium and Germany - showing resistance. This proposal discards all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reinstates the laxist provisions from the Commission, adding direct patentability of data structures and process descriptions as icing on the cake. In a remarkable sign of unity in times of imminent elections, members of the European Parliament from all political groups are condemning this blatant disrespect for democracy in Europe.
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Now some people call me paranoid but the same day a second pressrelease : http://www.eu2004.ie/sitetools/sponsorship.asp its kinda funny that Microsoft and dell are now sponsers of the The Irish Presidency of the EU.
If you want to hear a good speaker on why opensource, standards are so important for our future listen to this talk by Eben Moglen from the free sofrware foundation
(found on this page : http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/p.cgi/speakers.html) its about a hour well spend for many reasons not atleast because he is the guy responsible for the core of most of the ideas in opensource licenses and can explain them in laymen turns.
For dutch speakers I also attached a small reaction I made the last time in the 'patents' fight a few months back related to why we programmers break patents.
Daniel Ockeloen.
patenten_en_developers2.doc
Description: MS-Word document
