[Linux-aus] Re: Ross Gittins "Gets It" w.r.t. Software Patents

[greebo at pipka.org]

Hi Ronald 

Ronald Skeoch writes:
> On Sun, 2004-08-01 at 13:58, Les Bell wrote:
>> See http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/30/1091080437270.html . Good 

> Ross Giddens has followed up today's SMH
> This issue is so inportant for all Australian
> software people to understand
> I have taken the liberty of including same
> I could not of said it any better :

<snip> 

I completely agree. This article, and the other articles by Ross were very 
well written, and encapsulated some of our specific issues with the FTA. I 
encourage everyone to make a last ditch effort to educate your local 
parliament members and especially your companies and workmates in the last 
week up to the formal decision about the FTA. We actually need to start 
thinking about contingency plans, and I'll have something to post along 
those lines in the coming week. I'm thinking we get the Open Source 
community (including companies of course) involved in the patent process. 
Apparently patents have a public period where people can speak up about any 
prior art. I suggest we tie into this, and start getting involved with 
speaking up about patents. This means they won't necessarily get passed (if 
we have good cases) and then after say 6-12 months, we will potentially have 
a good paper trail of the issues the FTA has locked us into concerning 
patents. Other ideas are much welcome :) 

Cheers, 

Pia Smith
President of Linux Australia
http://www.linux.org.au