Elect NoSoftwarePatents as European Of The Year

Aargh writes "Every year a public Internet poll is taken to vote for, amongst others, the "European of the Year". This year, the founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com has been selected as a candidate. Taken from the NoSoftwarePatents.com site: "We now have a first-rate opportunity to make political leaders, media and citizens all over the world realize the significance of our cause. Please give us your vote, and help us gain more votes, so that the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign be elected as the new 'European of the Year'." Non-europeans can also vote, so why dont we unleash the slashdot hordes?" Mr. Mueller had been exchanging e-mails recently on this subject; thanks to an introduction from Kaj Arnö. I truly do think that given his, and the organization's work that they deserve to win. Check out the celebrity endorsements as well. *grin* Also, worth reading their voting guide if you are going to vote.

Too lazy, need a script

[Gopal.V]

Why doesn't someone write a greasemonkey script to mark all these votes ?

Then I can install it, click Vote and be done about it :D

Or on the other hand, I could read up on who all these people are before voting. NOT !!!

Flawed voting

[Ceriel Nosforit]

The form requires one to place a vote in all categories, even if I don't know who the people are or if I support none of them. This quite simply bullshit. To support one candidate I'll have support others I care none for.

This is supposed to be politics. This is supposed to mean somthing! How can they err on such a simple thing as a flawed system of voting when it is the foundation of democracy?

If you have no clue, please read

[TheTilde]

please read their recommandations on their voting guide. The recommandations are sensible and argumented, and when they don't want to choose (business leader of the year) they generate a random choice. I found it quite funny.

The issue is important.

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably get lots of replies. I advice you to have a look on the various anti-patents sites if you have not already.

- Software is generally implemented much quicker and with much less costs then ideas in the physical world. Even you could have a good idea and since there are _NO_ costs associated with reproducing your idea you can bring it on the market quickly. Unless ofcourse, you want to patent it. Then you spend $50000 at least on lawyers and patent costs. And you do not even know if this is going to work. This is way most small companies are not going to patent their SW ideas.

- 20 years for a patent effectively makes the idea useless for society, the software moves much faster then real-world things. In 20 years, new things will have been invented. Patents were made for making sure the idea would be produced and sold to the public, not to make one company ask a silly amount of money for it (or worse, just for keeping others from producing such a thing, which seems to be the standard these days). For 99% of the things, having your SW copyrighted will protect your idea long enough to make money of it.

There are more reasons of course, which i leave to others.

Re:Lets hear it for scalability

[Bubble666]

http://www.ev50.com/poll/ [ev50.com]
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Too many connections

E:\WWWROOT\WWW.EV50.COM\HTML\POLL\../include/dbhea der.asp, line 9

I got the same error message, I wonder what kind of Admin would setup a webserver with asp/mysql, and for a voting pool i mean, you gotta be a Stupid m*f* to think it'll handle a somewhat reasonable workload... why oh why did they not use something descent like *nix/apache with something like postgreSQL, it seems to me like a win win solution.

Re:Despite not being able to read that site...

[frisket]

OK, so we /.'d the site. But WTF is it on box running an operating system, made by one of the biggest offenders in the patent business?

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Too many connections
E:\WWWROOT\WWW.EV50.COM\HTML\POLL\../include/dbhea der.asp, line 9

Re:Looks like we might have a good chance

[FlorianMueller]

Your observations are correct. U2 called on its fans to vote for Bono (on the official U2 homepage), and some U2 fan sites made a similar call, but in terms of Internet publicity, we beat the rest of the field by a wide margin. A very solid majority of all participants in that poll has been sent to that poll by our PR and online campaigning activities. Slashdot is of course the biggest of its kind, but the site previously went down due to some of our mailings to registered opponents of software patents as well as articles on heise.de, TheInquirer.net, TheRegister.co.uk etc.

It's not just about whether we win, it's also how we win. We want to involve large parts of the community in this, and we hope to send a really strong message to Brussels (the de-facto capital of the EU). They should see our numerical strength and campaigning power once again. Unfortunately, the software patent issue hasn't been resolved for good in Europe, and it will resurface on the political agenda sooner or later. By winning this poll, we increase our chances of winning future battles. Publicity is an important way to influence politics.

Thank you for your well-considered support!

[FlorianMueller]

It's great that you gave this some serious thought, because that's what our core group of anti-swpat activists did as well. Obviously, other candidates also stand for important causes. It's just that their stories are much more attractive to the general press than something as esoteric as software patents, and that's why we need this kind of publicity more than they do.

As for Hirsi Ali's party, the VVD pushed for software patents like hardly any other political party in Europe. The whole directive project was started by Frits Bolkestein. On 1 July 2004, all of the Dutch parliament except for the VVD group supported a resolution that the Dutch government should retract its support to the EU Council's pro-patent proposal. And Toine Manders was a driving pro-patent force in the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe) group in the Europan Parliament. It was only toward the end of the process that he was burned out and (probably because Philips also wanted this) introduced a motion for rejection of the entire bill. On the day before the vote, I met him in an elevator in the European Parliament and we actually had a friendly discussion because we all wanted to go for rejection of the proposal, but let's face it: He's an intellectual property lawyer by profession, and he didn't call for rejection because he was against software patents. He just realized that his camp couldn't get its way, and then they decided to abort the process, which was perfectly fine with me.

Re:Disagree

[J.R. Random]

One problem is that no one has figured out how to distinguish "worthy" software patents from the vast flood of trivial ones in a way that will work in real life, with government patent examiners who are paid a fraction of what lawyers get in private practice. I can think of a handful of genuinely innovative algorithms that have been patented, such as RSA and the Karmarkar LP algorithm. In all cases they were created by researchers who get paid for publishing their results. In other words, the ideas would have been developed anyway, without any patents, so society has gained nothing by granting them a monopoly on their ideas. Would we really be bereft of innovation in the software industry if there were no patents at all? No rational person can really believe that. So there is really no case for software patents.