Re: [Fsfe-uk] Draft PR on swpat directive

[Bernhard Kaindl]

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Martin Keegan wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Sep 2003, Alex Hudson wrote:
>
> > The fact is that there was a tabled amendment that was highly pro-free
> > software, and it was rejected. Would the AFFS be wrong in not mentioning
> > it?
>
> Oh yes, it should be mentioned, and this can be done without passing
> judgment on whether free software particularism in EC patent law would
> help or harm free software in the long term.

It's a more or less hypothetical question now(because the parliament cannot
introduce something now at the second reading which it didn't pass in it's
first reading) and I think discussing anything which was not passed distracts
us from the real goal which I think should be that we should protect SMEs
in Europe, wether they produce free software or not.

I know this is not really free-software friendly at the first sight, but
one has to acknowledge today that the world is not ready to drop all these
closed source software SMEs at this moment and I think endangering these
SMEs which at least partially like free software(but cannot do free software
now because changing the business model(I know the CEO of one of these)) is
not something trivial and especially hard at these days where ecomomy is
weak...

So I really thing we should be social whith these small companies now and
help them also until they are ready to switch to a free software business
model.

Which means that I think we should focus on the general effects.

I think(and I think most politicians would agree with me) that free
software still makes a relatively small part of the software economy
when compared to the millions of SMEs in europe. And I might still
need them to have a job tomorrow.

Discussing about free software or not I think weakens the argument
because of these large number of SMEs and high percentage of european
software jobs affected and so mentioning them and talking about this
makes the argument stronger which is better for free software.

There was an organisation which has said to represent a large number
of SMEs and was against swpat, I think this is the kind of stuff we
should take!

Bernhard
--
Whatever you do will be insignificant,
but it is very important that you do it
                  -- Gandhi