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Just a legal comment:

1. The main cloaking scheme used in the bill is "preserve the Authors' Rights"; 2. They assume that a "Free Software" IS an "Open Source Software"; 3. They assume that if the Source is disclosed, any malicious person is able to modify the source to avoid any Authors' Rights protection.

Now, assuming that to make the code modifications the "malicious person" has to be:

1. able to read and well understand the software; 2. able to make the modifications in the code avoiding any damage to the application.

Now, in this situation the "malicious person" is somebody who is already able to write any software to break the Authors' Rights, so the next obvious step will be a Bill to establish a Security Clearance Certificate to be obtained in such way to be authorized to buy a compiler and, obviously, to get formed as Computer Programmer. Just crazy, but you know... business is business... they'll try whatever to avoid the knowledge sharing, so we have to be really careful and never ever underestimate any jeopardy.

Cheers Pino

Ricardo Andere de Mello wrote:

Jerome Dominguez wrote:

...

25 November 2005. FSF France press release. Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP tell Free Software authors: "You shall change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill pass in the Parliament.

URL: http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html

xenophobia to the last consequences...

[]s, gandhi