That anti-patent pamphlet I mentioned

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 07:30:55PM +0100, Arnoud Galactus Engelfriet wrote:
> Marcus,
> 
> You wrote:
> > If all you care about is your personal freedom, you might be fine with the
> > current developments in patent law.  However, I have extreme reservations
> > about your judgement of what is good and not good for the society if you
> > only value your own freedom and not that of others.  For example the freedom
> 
> I think you are being extremely unfair here. You make a value
> judgment about today's society regarding software patents.
> I respect that, but I make a different judgment. I can only
> tell you how I view the world and whether I am happy with
> the world.
> 
> Now you make it sound as if I am a completely selfish
> arrogant bastard who is incapable of caring about anyone
> but himself. I don't think I deserve that. I have different
> opinions than you, but that does not make me an evil person.

Maybe I was unfair, yes.  But sometimes you have to aim a bit higher to hit
the target.  You have an opinion and I respect that.  But I think that your
opinion is one that, if implemented, would be very bad for our society (and
all studies about patents support that).  And this is important, because we
are not having a philosophical discussion here (at least I am not).

We are now in a situation where a political decision will be made.  Now is
the time to act politically.  And in politics, just having an opinion is not
good enough.  I am sure that if we pull together 20 people, we will have 20
different opinions on patents (even if all 20 people are free software
programmers, and against them).

But it's one thing to have an opinion, and another thing to have a solution.

What we need now are solutions.  We can not go to the government and say
"let's make everything patentable that in Arnoud's (Marcus', Simon's,
whoever) opinion should be patentable".

Thanks,
Marcus


-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus at gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann at ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/