OFB Community Mailing Lists

[Norbert Bollow]

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Dear brothers and sisters,
  this email is mainly a request for contacts in Warsaw + prayer.
(The request for contacts is URGENT in the sense that responses after
Tuesday Feb 15 cannot possibly help, and every needless delay will
make things more difficult.)

I'm flying to Warsaw this coming Wednesday morning where I've been
invited to a meeting of a committee of the Polish parliament where
I've been invited to speak and also deliver a well-deserved thank-you
letter concerning an action which Poland has taken to prevent a
disaster with software patents in the EU (see below for some details
about what this is all about).

In the evening I'd like very much to give an evangelistic talk on
the topic "What Free Software and Poland's action against software
patents have to do with my desire to live a meaningful life."  The
idea for this is to give testimony about my experience of having
come into a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus
Christ and to explain what problems are caused in the world today
by wicked human business empires and how gospel of the Kingdom of
God (as contained in the Bible) is an answer to this.  This will
be an evangelistic talk.  When communicating with someone who is
not known to be a Christians I've described the type of my planned
talk with the words "Even though this talk will be from a Christian,
Biblical perspective, no previous knowledge of religious matters will
be required to understand what I have on my heart to say."

Obviously this is extremely short notice, and I don't know how many
people I might manage to attract.  But I certainly wouldn't want to
leave unused what may be a good evangelistic opportunity.  I'm
comfortable with speaking in any kind of venue including (but not
limited to) a rented room in a restaurant, a lecture hall, a private
living room, or any kind of "church" facilities.

I'd *really* appreciate of someone could put me in touch with
someone in Warsaw who may be able to help me with organizing such
an evangelistic talk, on short notice as it is.

Please pray for this.

Also, if someone has contacts to Christian media, it would be good
to invite them to attend both the press conference (which will be
in the early afternoon) and my talk in the evening.  The threat of
software patents is such an important topic that it is certainly
good if as many praying Christians as possible can be made aware of
the issue.  (Inviting representatives of secular media to that press
conference is good too, of course, although I believe that there's
someone in Warsaw already working on that.)


Now for some background history which explains not only more than
you ever wanted to know about EU software patents politics, but also
how I came to get invited to speak to all those influential Polish
politicians:

Software patents are so unpopular among EU politicians that those
who have been pushing the adoption of the directive which would
legalize them have felt forced to tell lies claiming that the
proposed directive text disallows software patents.  The reality
is that the proposed directive text allows not only patents on
software ideas, but also e.g. on ideas for surgical procedures.
(In the "EU", a "directive" is something which every member country
will have to turn into national law).  What happened was that a
very bad draft directive text was proposed by the "EU Commission"
and given to the EU parliament.  The EU parliament then did a lot of
work, making a lot of good changes which modified the very bad draft
directive text into something that's actually acceptable.  The main
point is that the EU parliament inserted precise definitions of
what is a patentable "technical invention", thereby limiting the
scope of patentability to what has traditionally been patentable.
After this work was complete, something really astonishing happened:
The "EU Commission" made a "political agreement" on a "compromise"
which is in fact worse than the original directive draft was, totally
ignoring all the good changes from the EU parliament.  This
"compromise" text was then translated into all languages of EU member
countries and inserted on extremely short notice as a so-called
"A-item" onto the agenda of the "Agricultural Council" meeting (where
each EU member country is represented, typically by the minister of
agriculture, or a diplomat of that country) of Dec 21, 2004.  The
meaning of an  "A-item" is that if it's on the agenda and no-one says
anything about it during the meeting, it has been passed.  This
procedure is meant for uncontroversial points where no further
discussion is needed and holding a formal vote of the representatives
of the member countries is considered to be unnecessary.  However this
procedure can also be used to proposed directives adopted for which a
"political agreement" exists which does have actually have a majority
of votes among member countries.  This totally undemocratic
decision-making process works by applying political pressure to remain
silent on the representatives of member countries who have doubts or
objections about a proposed directive.  At the "Agricultural Council"
meeting of Dec 21, 2004 this had been orchestrated and everyone
expected the plan to work until, to everyone's surprise, the Polish
minister for Science and Information Technology showed up to represent
Poland at that "Agricultural Council" meeting with an objection
against passing that "software patents directive" as an A-item.  In
reaction I created an online thank-you letter for the Polish
government at http://thankpoland.info which has by now >30000
confirmed signatures.  Apparently this is appreciated in Warsaw and
I got a nice, although pretty sudden, invitation. :-)

Of course we'd all like to know who is behind that strange push for
legalizing software patents.  What is clear is that neither the EU
parliament nor the national parliaments of member countries are behind
it.  In fact in several countries whose governments supported that
weird "political agreement", the national parliaments have reacted by
passing resolutions against software patents.  (A problem here is that
it's not illegal for national governments to simply ignore such
resolutions from their national parliaments.)  Florian Mueller, a well-
informed lobbyist in Brussels, explains the phenomenon as follows on
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=351 :

  "That political agreement had been fabricated in a ruthless and
  untruthful way by then-Commissioner Bolkestein and the then-Irish
  presidence of the Council.  The Irish government simply does whatever
  Microsoft tells it to do.  Microsoft is Ireland's largest tax-payer
  since all of Microsoft's European business is done out of
  Ireland.  Unfortunately, the rest of Europe is stupid enough to let
  Ireland not only suck a lot of potential revenue out of the rest of
  the EU but also to let Ireland push aggressively for software
  patents."

Greetings, Norbert.

- -- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of DotGNU, see http://dotgnu.org/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 44 972 20 59        Fax +41 44 972 20 69      http://bollow.ch
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