Carlo Piana :: Law is Freedom ::

Recently the Koss (Korean Open Source Software) group has organized the first Korean Free Software conference in Seoul, in cooperation with NIPA, the governmental agency for the promotion of Information Technology industry. FSFE contributed to the organization and I, as well as a few other people, have been invited to present our views at the conference.

My speech started like "I knew I should not come to teach, but to learn, and indeed my anticipation was correct". Korea seems to have a lot to teach us. They are coming from behind, but have covered great length, and show some impressive numbers of adoption. At least they have a strategy and an agenda by which public authorities shall adopt Free Software.

On November 17 I will fly over to Korea to attend and speak at what seems the largest Free Software event so far in the country, under the auspices of the Korean Government, through the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), and with the sponsoring also of the FSFE.

In memoriam of Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, September 9, 1941 — October 8/9, 2011

While the World (and I) was all concentrating on the departure of Steve Jobs, a man whose achievements have had an even greater impact on today's world is with us no more. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie left us on 8 October 2011. It is sad, very sad, that all major press reported the two passing aways with so starkingly different emphasis. The C programming language is the foundation of all modern operating systems, and virtually of all commonly used applications and programming languages. But the reality distortion field is still on.

In memoriam.

As of today, this website is IPV6 ready.

This morning I have read this article on Tech Crunch mentioning that – great news – one of the senior executives of Google has finally said it loud what we have thought for years: [most] software patents are detrimental to innovation. Only, he falls short of the point, because he asks for a "real patent reform," whereas the only suitable reform is a software patent abolition (if not an entire patent system abolition, but that is another discussion). All software patents are detrimental to innovation. Period.

But software patents are also detrimental to competition. Especially if they are used in an anticompetitive way. The Microsoft case, once again, gives us good food for thought and leads me to think that there is more than one antitrust concern over the sale of Nortel patents. May I attempt a few short answers to reasonable questions that are lingering around when I mention the antitrust issue. I plead guilty of omitting much of the necessary background.

Karsten Gerloff, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe, publishes a blog post on the hearing in the Microsoft v Commission case (T-167/08) dealing with the 899 million euro fine for failing to offer reasonable and non discriminatory condition for revealing secret interoperability information, AKA the "no patent" agreement that the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation has subsequently negotiated to provide same information to Samba Team and others. The article is offered under the condition "Creative Commons Attribution" (CC-BY)