On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, [Dhruv] wrote:
> hey there fellow luggers, > I just read this amazing article that i thougt id share with you. > > It comes as a real shocker and is so true. > > http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-13-009-20-OP I simply believe this author "just doesn't get it", and is in full liklihood an employee of Sun. The battleground is not technical, but legal. Sun and Java is as much if not more of a threat to Open Source than Microsoft and .NET is. Barriers to Open Source are in legal problems relating to copyright and patent claims. If one ignores the unknown (and immoral) software patent issue, .NET is much less proprietary than Java is - and this author begs us to try to ignore this basic fact. The way to battle this is on two fronts: a) Support the technology people, such as the team working on both the GPL'd Java and C#/CLI (Mono) projects. b) Lobby governments to invalidate (or just never adopt) software patents, to require full and proper validity testing of current patents, and to reverse regressive expansion of copyright (IE: Communications forms such as user interfaces, API's, communications standards and publicly communicated file formats should not be elegable for copyright protectionism. Circumvention of encryption for the purpose of creating compatable tools or file conversion must be explicitly protected in law, not made illegal). Does India have an equivalent of the USA's EFF? --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> See http://weblog.flora.org/ for announcements, activities, and opinions Oppose DMCA in Canada! (C) reform process.... IP Counter Essay Contest! G20 events, Electoral Reform, Taxation, Microsoft, Buy Nothing Day, .. -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/help/faq_list.html
