We'll release the first discussion draft very late this year or very early next year. We'll provide an extensive rationale as to why we made the choices we made and, in a limited way, why we didn't include some other suggestions.
"Eben Moglen" is a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center, whose client list includes numerous pro bono clients, such as the Free Software Foundation.
More Eben Moglen on Wikipedia.No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear.
(Open-source firms) are engaging in substantial, active, prosperous business ? making money for their shareholders and helping investors.
IBM has decided that being a company committed to open standards, open document formats and free software means ultimately reassessing the patent process and its role in your relationship to your customers.
Patents which conserve an edge in a rapidly changing market, may have uses for companies such as IBM. But patents which inhibit your customer's ability to achieve their own goals or to contribute to jointly build technology or community build technology are not useful to a company such as IBM wishes to be.
The big boys, corporations and governments, have far more reason to be interested and concerned this time.
We think it's a serious problem; we don't have a solution to recommend. We regard today's draft as simply serving notice that this is a problem that can no longer be ignored.
The right to speak PGP is the right to speak Navajo.
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