"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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