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[Australia-public-discuss] Lobbying greens support.
From: |
Shayne O'Neill |
Subject: |
[Australia-public-discuss] Lobbying greens support. |
Date: |
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:22:09 +0800 |
Hi guys, new to this list, cant find archives so I apologise if I'm
reitterating over any previous ground.
I'm old friends with Scott Ludlum of the Greens, whos been doing , in my
slightly biased opinion, a somewhat heroic job leading the charge against the
net filter in the senate estimates committee. He's reasonably competent on tech
issues for a non techy type, and might well be interested in taking up the
charge against the software patents proposals.
What would be really good to see is some sort of dossier on the issue,
particularly on how it affects small australian business and innovation, but
also how it affects the free & open source community and perhaps for that
greens touch, green computing.
I'm not really up to date enough on this to fully prepare it myself, so is
there anyone who would be interested in putting their hands up for this.
Things to keep in mind about the greens:
1) The greens are not really socialists, but they certainly are not freemarket
libertarians. Free market arguments will not necessarily win the argument with
them, but arguments about *small* business, and workers in bigger businesses,
will.
2) The greens are naturally attracted to the open and free source software
movements. Free software embodies a lot of the arguments about community/DIY
organising that the greens feel should be central to their vision of a 'better'
future.
3) The greens are *very* attracted to arguments about sustainability and
diversity. A possible example of this sort of argument might be around
compression algorithms. Compression saves energy by minimizing entropy and less
abstractly communication infrastructure energy use and expenditure. Algorithms
such as g729 are excluded from free software and small business written
software because of the outrageous costs to licence. The end result is most
free software voip uses either G711, a bandwidth hungry broadband codec, or
iLBC a processor hungry codec. Neither of which really qualify as suitable
'green' algorithms.
4) Exposure to predatory american patent trolls. This can be a small business
killer, especially in low-return and garage industries like iPhone development
where a single lawsuit could effectively kill the operation before it even hit
court.
It might also be worth noting the european situation, and moves to rethink the
patent laws in the US.
If anyone wants to help put this together, I can get it to scott and maybe
discuss it with him over beers.
From there he might be able to talk to other greens senators to get it made
into a platform for the party.
These are largely different arguments to win the libs over. For them the
important factor will be protest from software design houses (I intend to talk
to my local guy at some point about how the g729 codec affects my business) ,
and although I'm by default a labor voter, I'm far too angry with conroys utter
technological illiteracy, and arrogance, to be unable to think up a rational
approach to him.
Regards,
Shayne.
===================================
Shayne O'Neill Development
Mobile, Web and Business process integration.
address@hidden
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