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Today's Topics:
- Cowan's Innovation Taskforce and swpats (Ciaran
O'Riordan)
Message: 1 Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:01:48 +0100 From: Ciaran O'Riordan ciaran@member.fsf.org Subject: [Fsfe-ie] Cowan's Innovation Taskforce and swpats To: fsfe-ie@fsfeurope.org Message-ID: 9lljmhifoj.fsf@vorcha.compsoc.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
It's reasonable to guess that the innovation taskforce[0] that Brian Cowan has announced will form an opinion about patents and IT/computers/software.
[0] http://www.ireland.com/home/Taoiseach_establishes_innovation_taskforce/maxi/...
Does anyone have ideas on who to contact or how to approach this?
Being optimistic, there's a possibility that they'll conclude that software patents are anti-innovation, like the UK government's independent study did in 2005: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Gowers_Review_of_Intellectual_Property
But being a bit more cautious: the membership is mostly people decision makers in universities, and they're under huge pressure to be profitable this year. So it's possible that royalties and appeasing MS+IBM might take preference over innovation, freedom, progress, etc.
Certain universities (admin side, not faculty) have a close relationship with MS, so there's that. And Irish Government ministers (the most unlikely people in the world to stick their necks out on point of principle) are likely to value jobs and taxes from MS.
My advice? Leave out any mention of ideology, instead go in with case studies of easy wins for FLOSS adoption such as Apache, Firefox, InkScape and Open Office. Get them used to the GPL, and to free not necessarily meaning rubbish.
"maoltuile" maoltuile@utvinternet.com writes:
My advice? Leave out any mention of ideology, instead go in with case studies of easy wins for FLOSS adoption such as Apache, Firefox, InkScape and Open Office.
For software patents, I'm building a collection of studies here: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Studies_on_economics_and_innovation
And there's a page for Ireland: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Ireland
Good examples of free software case studies can be found on: http://wiki.fsfe.org/Free_Software_usage_in_education http://wiki.fsfe.org/Free_Software_usage_in_public_administration