Re: [Sheflug] RMS Speech

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 10:26, Chris Johnson wrote:
> Does anyone have the URL of the text of the RMS speech on free software.  It
> was on the web before his visit to Sheffield and I wanted to take some of
> the ideas from it to include in a reply to the letter from the H.o.P. I got
> after my letter to my MP.  They are, as was suspected, missing the point.

You can usually find them on gnu.org, somewhere like:

	http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html

(they have transcripts, like
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/stallman-patents.html).

If you want a good example of how patents block people from
interoperating, show them the recent Microsoft patent licence:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/format/xmlpatentlicense.asp

They are using their patent portfolio to stop people reading and writing
their file format. There is nothing innovative about it, certainly
nothing that should be patentable. But they have patents like these:

http://register.epoline.org/espacenet/regviewer?AP=EP20020013984
(this one hasn't been granted yet, though....)

Make sure they realise how diametrically opposed to competition patents
are in this particular field. You may also want to mention the recent
FTC report which was damning about software patents.

Cheers,

Alex.


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