FTISA is submitting comments to the South African parliamentary committee on the new IPR bill on publicly funded research.
The FTISA submission on the bill can be found here. You will need to be invited by a FTISA member to participate in adding your inputs to the document.
Hello everyone,
Last week I wrote a letter (viewable on my blog on the Chsimba Alpha code test site here) to Stafford Masie of Novell South Africa, which I copied to a couple of mailing lists, and which in turn was picked up an published on a number of news sites. I would like to clarify my concerns, and report on the conversation that I have had with representatives of Novell.
In the letter I expressed dissatisfaction regarding Novell’s covenant with Microsoft about software patents. I suggested that this covenant had created considerable discord within the Free Software community, and that this could constitute risk to the ability of Novell to deliver on our business requirements as a customer.
It is important to clarify that I have no objection in principle to the part of the agreement relating to interoperability between GNU/Linux and Windows. Indeed, I suspect that this will be benefit penetration of GNU/Linux into the enterprise.
The Free and Open Source Software ecosystem differs from proprietary software ecosystems in having a strong element of community, which is itself heterogeneous in nature. The success of Free and Open Source Software depends not only on the quality of the technology and the actions of companies, but also on the behaviour of this community. Read the rest of this entry »
: ..language was patented and couldn't evolve
: open science amongst African scientists was not science fiction...
: the cure to the AIDS virus was patented on discovery...
: the International Standards Organisation required standards to be open
: poor entrepreneurs could innovate without fear of being sued by multinationals
: Imagine if you could use the research paid for by your taxes
: Imagine if when your taxes paid to write code then you could use that code
: There is no freedom without freedom to innovate!
: My taxes my content
: Einstein stayed in a patent office
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