Re: [Fsfe-uk] Richard Stallman Speech 26th Oct

[Nick Hill]

Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> The topic for Sheffield is also to do with Software Patents as in the
> Sheflug web site... a safe guess is it is to point out the negative
> aspects of it :-) 
>
> Nick's PDF is not there at the end of the link ... but on the earlier
> version I saw, remember reading it  RMS  introduced as the 'founder of
> the GNU project'  ... could we have him introduced like this together
> with 'the president of FSF' in the diary?

I originally gave you a link to the draft version, which is no longer 
available.

The current version is:
ftp://ftp.nickhill.co.uk/pub/rms-westminster.pdf

And is available. 80 people have downloaded it so far.

The full text of the poster is:


Short Notice
This Weekend
Richard Stallman
will be speaking about
The dangers of software patents
on Sunday 26th Oct at 2:30pm in
The Large Lecture Theatre
Cavendish Campus
University of Westminster
115 New Cavendish St. London.
Entry: Free
GNU books available
About Richard Stallman:
Richard Stallman is a central figure of the free software
movement, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software
Foundation. He invented the concept of copyleft to support this
movement, and embodied the concept in the widely-used GNU General
Public License (GPL) software license. He is also a notable
programmer with his major accomplishments including the
text-editor Emacs, the compiler GCC, and the debugger GDB, all of
which are part of the GNU project. His influence was essential
for establishing the moral, political, and legal framework for
the free software movement, as an alternative to proprietary
software development and distribution.
About SoftwarePatents:
Patents can affect independent creations,
unlike copyrights. Software patents could render software
copyrights useless. One program could be covered by hundreds of
patents that the author doesn't know about, but both author and
users can be sued for each infringement of them. It may be
impossible to avoid infringing some patents, because they are too
broad or part of a necessary standard. In some patent systems, it
is possible to conceal the patent details for a time, even while
encouraging others to infringe it.