"economic" mojority
Alessandro Rubini
rubini at gnu.org
Fri Aug 10 10:57:33 UTC 2001
Hi all.
MMS wrote:
> I wouldn't. In a democratic system everyone has exactly
> _one_ vote. There is no "weigthing".
On the other hand, this is not a democratic vote, nor it is a serious
research made on a carefully selected sample of the population.
I don't think banning the document as "undemocratic" is fair.
So, while I disagree on several points, I understand their weigthing.
In my mind, I hear them saying: "most people who replied followed the
open-source tam-tam, something that doesn't exist in other cultural
environments".
Actually, they explicitly write:
> Many of the individual responses in the Eurolinux "petition" had
> obviously been influenced by the contents of the e-mail from
> Eurolinux.
I didn't yet read carefully the report, but I fear it has some more
subtle errors.
For example this is immediately apparent from the report:
> Pie charts:
> Opponents of Software Patents [...] SME 16% [...]
> Supporters of S/W related Patents [...] SME 13% [...]
>
> The differences between the two groups are stark. It is interesting,
> however, to note that the proportion of SMEs is similar in each
> case.
This is very wrong reasoning, in my opinion. They convey the idea that
SME's are equally for and against swpats; the real figure is that the
former is a huge numbers of SME's and the latter is a few of them.
/alessandro
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