[Fsfe-france] Re: Software Patents Agenda

[Xuan Baldauf]

PILCH Hartmut wrote:

> >       You stated your position quite clearly.
>
> Maybe paranoid, due to an urgent desire to get things moving quickly, and
> a recent experience of too much terminology warfare. Btw I am already
> preparing a worldwide version of the petition, and the name
> petition.eurolinux.org is more likely to step back behind the alias
> www.noepatents.org in that case.  You can already find the petition behind
> both, and that was always so.
>
> We have been thinking about the pros and cons of those two names that
> existed from the start.  I myself like a name like ffii.org, because it
> makes the concept very clear.  But that kind of clarity may not be the
> foremost function of short names.  Some people say that this kind of
> abstract naming works only in Germany.  But probably that is just flattery
> to the clichee of German fondness of philosophical abstraction.
> Unfortunately most people everywhere do not think in doctrines of whatever
> kind of freedom or openness, but in vague associations that can only at a
> later stage be complemented by rigid thinking.  With most people, we don't
> ever get to that stage.  The Linux penguin is a carrier of sympathy that
> helped the petition grow big.  Also, it is understood to encompass some
> proprietary software that runs on that platform and to stand for a
> burgenoning sector in which Europe is strong.  So it is a name that can
> well be associated with everything that stands behind the anti swpat
> movement.  Astonishingly enough, most politicians who decide in our favor
> are not motivated by a real knowledge about the danger of swpat but by the
> feeling that the penguin bandwagon deserves their support.  And even on a
> worldwide scale, it may not be bad marketing to present this as a movement
> that is related to "Europe" and "Linux".  "no e-patents" is not all that
> much clearer and sounds negative.  But we'll let people decide which name
> they prefer.  We even have noepatents.com, so as to suggest that having no
> software patents is a source of wealth.
>
> A lot of work is needed and it is very good that you are pushing us to get
> crucial parts like the how-to-help document relaunched quickly.
>
> Cheers

I like your reasoning about strongly defined terms and words which are weakly
associated with a meaning due to human's fuzzy logic and "emotional reasoning".

Maybe I can help with the domains "save-our-software.de" and
"saveoursoftware.de", which both have a strong emotional association due to the
"SOS" relation. Yes, they are only .de-domains... Yet "save-our-software.org"
and "saveoursoftware.org" are still not reserved by anybody.

>
>
> --
> Hartmut Pilch
> Federation for a Free Information Infrastructure        http://www.ffii.org/
> For a software patent free Europe PLEASE SIGN http://petition.eurolinux.org/
>
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Xuân.