7 March 2005 — The Council Presidency today declared the software agreement of 18 May 2004 to have been adopted, in violation of the procedural rules and in spite of the evident lack of a qualified majority of member states and the requests of several states to reopen negotiations.
Council Presidency Adopts Software Patent Agreement Against Council’s Rules
Free software and open source: The freedom debate and its consequences
– Mathias Klang
“To most outsiders the ethics of software is not something usually considered. To most proficient computer users with a passing interest in this question the ethics of software is recognised as one of the fundamental questions in the digital rights area. To most of the latter, terms such as free software, open source, and their derivatives (FLOSS, FOSS, Software Freedom) are interchangeable. Choosing one over the other is a matter of taste rather than politics.”
The purpose of this course will be to study the effects of technology on the political process by studying how the free software/open source movements organises itself and acts to lobby and affect political decisions in favour for the fundamental messages and ideologies. The course has the intention to help the participant to achieve a greater understanding of the political goals of the free software/open source movements. In addition the course will look at the political and economic conditions for the development of open source and free software.
The course will study the development of politics, policy and law in relation to the role of software in society. Subjects which will be treated in depth are the role of free software/open source in relation to property theory, the politics of technology, community governance and the economic foundations for the assessment of free software/open source development.
The course
The course is given as a part time course from April to June (2005). Teaching on the course will be carried out with the help of lectures, readings and group discussions. Examination is carried out through two shorter written assignments and a longer essay (4500 words).
The Danish Parliament (by the EU Committee) has decided to change the mandate of the Danish government to ensure that on the next meeting in the EU Council the software patent directive will be discussed as a B-item instead of passing as an A-item without any discussion.
Other parliaments have passed resolutions opposing the software patent directive. But Denmark is the first country to call for a B-item and thereby reopening the discussion. If just The Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Spain backs the Danish request, there will not be a qualified majority in favor of passing the directive without discussion.
“This is a victory for the democratic process in the European Union. Both in Denmark and the rest of Europe there have been a tremendous interest in this issue.- IT-Political Association is ecstatic now that there is a very good chance that the all the citizens in Europe will have a chance to participate in the discussion of the directive,” Ole Tange, board member in IT-Political Association says. “We do not view this as a failure for the proponents of the directive; if their arguments are valid they would still have been valid after a democratic discussion. Though so far we have not seen valid arguments.”
Niels Elgaard Larsen, Anne Østergaard, and Ole Tange from IT-pol.dk spoke to the EU Committee in Folketinget.dk as part of a delegation also counting Peter Ussing from PROSA.dk and Peter Mogensen from
Digitalforbruger.dk
Det är ett välbekant faktum att det amerikanska företaget Microsofts program finns i nästan alla datorer. En stor majoritet av företagets datorprogram till skolor när det gäller ordbehandling, kalkylprogram och presentationsprogram köps sannolikt in slentrianmässigt eller åtminstone ganska rutinmässigt. Är det bra? Nej!
Göteborgs-Posten Göteborgs-Posten
Older news but I wanted it here!
These musicians are saying that true creativity needs to be open, fluid, and alive. When it comes to copyright, they are pro-choice. Here are 16 songs that encourage people to play with their tunes, not just play them.
WIRED magazine, November 2004 issue (get the CD free with your copy)
“The recipe and the whole brand of Our Beer is published under a Creative Commons license, which basically means that anyone can use our recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative of our recipe.”
The war of words between Microsoft and the open source movement heated
up this week as Linux founder Linus Torvalds led an attack on software
patents.
In a panel discussion at a Linux summit in California Mr Torvalds said
software patents were a problem for the open source movement.
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4229689.stm
Here are the essays produced in the course “Free Software/Open Source: Theory and Philosophy” held in Autumn 2004 at the University of Göteborg.
http://www.informatik.gu.se/~jonas/osfs-vt2004/
“Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration says the open-source policy makes sense for a developing country where a mere 10 percent of the 182 million people have computers at home, and where the debt-laden government is the nation’s biggest computer buyer. ”
Boston Herald
Monday, January 31, 2005
http://business.bostonherald.com/technologyNews/view.bg?articleid=66105