Hi,
I spent a few hours reconstructing the history of the revision of EPC (European Patent Convention) that started in 1997 and had the goal of allowing software patents. The result is at
http://www.fsfeurope.org/swpat/patents.en.html
and I cut/pasted it in
http://petition.eurolinux.org/reference/agenda/
In addition I wrote a terse summary of the software patent situation at http://www.fsfeurope.org/swpat/swpat.en.html.
Hartmut, would you like me to put that summary somewhere on petition.eurolinux.org ?
Cheers,