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Eurolinux petition for a software patent-free Europe

Jun 16, 2000 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — 5 views

Europe — (announcement) — The Eurolinux Alliance of European software companies and OpenSource associations has launched a campaign to warn European legislators against the dangers of software patents.

This campaign is a response of IT associations and software companies to recent hardline proprietarist speeches from the European Commission's Directorate for the Internal Market, which indicated that the Directorate will issue a directive to extend the patent system to software and intellectual methods, completely ignoring the concerns raised by leading software companies and developpers, and refusing even to study the economic effects of software patenting.

Previous campaigns to this subject had quickly assembled approximately 10000 signatures from software developpers. The current campaign will go further. Based on clear demands and thourough documentation, the Eurolinux Alliance will submit its petition to the European parlament and use advanced (not yet patentable) e-techniques to let volunteers participate in lobbying the key decisionmakers.

The petition is located here

About the EuroLinux Alliance (www.eurolinux.org)

The EuroLinux Alliance promotes a free information infrastructure in order to garantee optimal economic conditions for free competition, innovation and technology diffusion in the IT industry. The EuroLinux Alliance is an ongoing initiative to create a European lobbying group which main task will be to protect and promote commercial and moral interests of independent sofware developers in Europe with commercial or non-profit activity related to Linux, Free Software or Open Standards.

Goals:

  1. protect and promote Linux in Europe
  2. protect and promote Commercial software and service activities for Linux in Europe
  3. protect and promote GNU, FreeBSD, XFree, TeX, KDE and other Free Software
  4. protect and promote Open Standards and Open Interfaces in Europe
  5. protect and promote Competition and Innovation in the IT industry
Program
  1. Protection of Europe from a US-like patent system which would play against the development of open source software, independent software makers and independent ecommerce in Europe
  2. International promotion of European Software for Linux and European Free Software
Ongoing Actions
  1. The freepatents.org campaign
  2. The Europe Japan Conference on Linux And Free Software

     
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