Dear Debian Developers,
as some of you might have read on DWN the FFII is organizing some last
minute protest against Software Patent legalization in the EU (the
European Parliament plans to vote on this topic in the week beginning
with September 1st). To find more information about the protest read the
press release on http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/demo0819. In addition to
the demonstration and conference in Brussels the FFII is encouraging
free software projects and others to participate in an online
demonstration (http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo).
As a member of the FFII I'm trying to spread the news about this online
demonstration and try to motivate free software projects to participate
in it. However, contacting all possible candidates individually is a
tedious task. Therefore, a fellow FFII member recently had the idea to
ask maintainers of Debian packages to help us out:
A systematic way to do it might be sending a mail to
debian-devel (I guess that's the list) and ask each debian developer
to please send a message to upstream maintainers or file a bug (a
political system bug which can kill the project) against the project
they maintain to ask them to join the online demo.
So that's what I'm doing: Could some of you please help us? I appended
a sample text below that maintainers/developers can use when contacting
the projects that they are affiliated with.
To make a message more convincing it might be a good idea to find a
patent a project is infringing upon. Just take a look at the software
patent horror gallery (http://swpat.ffii.org/patents), the patent
database of the European Patent Office at http://ep.espacenet.com
(includes US and other patents), or, if you understand german,
http://patinfo.ffii.org/patente.html.
Another question: Could we get this call for help (or a similar version)
into the debian-devel-announce mailing list?
Felix
Sample message:
Subject: Could ... help protest against SWPats?
Hi,
as you might have heard the FFII (http://www.ffii.org) is organizing a
demonstration and conference on August 27th (see the latest press
release at http://swpat.ffii.org/neues/03/demo0819/index.en.html). The
goal is to make people and MEPs (members of the European parliament)
aware of the dangers surrounding the legalization of software patents
that may be up for vote in the European Parliament as early as September
1st. The main part of the event will take place in Brussels. In addition
there will be an "online demonstration" whose idea is to simulate the
effects of Software Patents by shutting down web sites on August 27th
(http://swpat.ffii.org/gruppe/demo/index.de.html).
Is there any chance that the ...... project participates in this event?
Note that the ....... web site doesn't need to be closed down
completely. On http://swpat.ffii.org/gruppe/demo/index.de.html there are
several examples on how it's possible to show ones concerns without
taking such drastic measures, but there's no need to stick to the
examples.
Just as a quick reminder: Many trivial patents
(http://swpat.ffii.org/patente) are already granted in the US and, in
spite of the current legislation, in the EU (see Art. 52 of the European
Patent Convention). I for one don't want to have software (and
consequently algorithms) to be legally patentable in Europe and fear
that it will ultimately kill the competitiveness of Free Software.
Regards,
......
--
To contact me in private don't reply but send mail to
felix DOT klee AT inka DOT de
