Re: GPLv3 comedy unfolding -- Mueller: "could become a litmus test"

[Alexander Terekhov]

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AGIPNEWS3362

31/7/2006 09:00 GMT
ag-IP-news
FSF Should Stand Firm on Patents Despite Pressure from Large
Corporations – Mueller

Special to ag-IP-news Agency

MUNICH - Florian Mueller, the founder of Europe's award-winning
NoSoftwarePatents campaign, believes the Free Software Foundation's
(FSF) should not soften the patent-related provisions in its draft GPLv3
license.

The campaigner called on the FSF to "stand firm on patents no matter
what HP [Hewlett-Packard] and other large corporations say".

In response to previous comments by Linus Torvalds and HP, Mueller wrote
in his blog that "it's good if companies like HP, and even more so IBM,
are forced to come clean. So far there is a lot of ambiguity, or I
should say self-contradiction in the strategies of those organizations.
They claim to support the idea of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
whenever it's useful to them from a sales, marketing or public relations
perspective, but
it's still infinitely more important to them to have tens of thousands
of software patents."

He hopes the GPLv3 "could become a litmus test: those who are sincere
and really want Free Software and a competitive software market will
support it sooner or later, and those who have a hidden agenda won't".

In this context, Mueller recalls that, according to information he
recently published in his blog, even Red Hat's Deputy General Counsel
Mark Webbink "tried, together with IBM, to keep the EU software patent
directive alive last year." Mueller also points to the fact that Linus
Torvalds, who has said he will not make the Linux kernel available under
the GPLv3, is "on the payroll of the OSDL, an organization that gets
most of its funding from a few large corporations such as IBM and HP."
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regards,
alexander.