On 04/08/2014 12:39 PM, Erik Albers wrote:
thank you very much for your engagement, I hope it will pay out.
Fortunately, on national level, many countries inside the European Union now are aware of the damaging activities of software patents. Unfortunately, this is not yet true for the European Institutions and Lobbyists still try hard to to enforce them in Europe.
Thanks to you for your feedback. At least we're succeeding in creating genuine awareness about software patents. Winning the referendum is another thing (but let's see - there's some non-FS-related general anti-EU boost too).
Fun story from Denmark:
Hacktivist Christian Panton created a JavaScript client to replace the proprietary, privacy-invading, security-challenged signed Java applet deployed with our national digital signature/SSO.
The proprietary Java applet must have read and write access to your files to run, which is not nice when it's a government-sponsored program that must run on everyone's computers. For that reason, I only ever run it in a virtual machine.
But Panton solved the problem by creating a JavaScript client, something the company behind the signature has been unable to do with 40 million kroner on top of the > 1 billion they spent on the solution itself.
They retaliated by threatening him with PATENT VIOLATIONS:
http://www.version2.dk/artikel/nets-vi-bruger-softwarepatenter-56815
When asked what patents they were talking about, they declined to answer.