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

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 13:16, Bernhard Kaindl wrote:
> 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

Well, it would be possible to state "this could have been better". The
point isn't necessarily to make it better, merely to say it could have
been.

> 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

To be honest, I think this is mostly irrelevant. The AFFS is not here to
further non-free software, so we don't really care whether or not people
developing proprietary software would be damaged by it (in a simplistic
view). As an organisation, I don't think we should be compromising our
views for the sake of being less politically "difficult" or something.

And, I don't think that the amendment would have been anti-proprietary
software companies anyway - it would have been pro-free software, but I
don't think would have been anti-non-free software (if you see what I
mean!)

I think what got me about the amendment would that it would have been at
least partially discriminatory. It would be similar to licensing
software as Free Software, but saying "you can only use this free
software if all the software you develop is also free software" (which
is subtley but vastly different to copyleft). And on a wider scale,
Martin's point about developing software in a vacuum is also clearly
correct.

It might be right to mention that the directive could be better (we also
talk about other problems it has), but I think strategically we
shouldn't focus to hard on that particular amendment, even though on the
surface it is pro-free software. However, it's not totally clear-cut
which is why I ask people's opinions on it.

Cheers,

Alex.