[NBLUG/talk] Knoppix "closed"

Crawford Rainwater crawford.rainwater at itec-co.com
Fri Oct 3 08:53:00 PDT 2003


For those wanting a copy of Knoppix 3.3 on CD, LinuxCentral has them for
sale at present (forgot what the cost is since I get them in bulk with
ITEC's classes).

FWIW.

--- Crawford

On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 09:46, Cameron Tully-Smith wrote:
> Software patents mentioned at http://www.knoppix.org/ :
> 
> Closed because of "Software-Patents"
> In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the
> legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which
> are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors
> out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software
> projects such as KNOPPIX, at least within Europe, because the holders of
> the over 30,000 already granted "software patents" (currently without a
> legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for
> trivial things like "progress bars", "mouseclicks on online order forms",
> "scrolling within a window" and similar. That way, software developers
> will have to pay the "software-patentholders" for using these features,
> even in their own, completely self-developed applications, which can
> completely stall the development of innovative software for small and
> medium companies. Apart from this, the expense for patent inquiries and
> legal assistence is high, for even trying to find out if the
> self-developed software is possibly violating "software-patents", if you
> want to continue to market your software. Contrary to real patents,
> "software-patents" are, in the current draft, monopolization of business
> ideas and methods, even without any tangible technical implementation.
> 
> 




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