[Preston] Meeting on Weds: Virtual Machine Monitors

[Matthew T. Atkinson]

'ello,

Thanks for that description of the workshop you attended.  I especially
appreciate the facts and figures you explained.  I hope that the UKPO
take note of the majority being against software patents.  One would
hope that they'd trust the judgement of software developers (but as this
makes sense, I am not so sure they will...)

I think that one of the biggest problems that the opposition to Software
Patents faces is that right now it just isn't seen to be such an
important issue by most people because of all the other stuff that's
going on.  But 50 years down the line of having Software Patents, the
general public will be locked-in to whatever proprietary stuff is
fashionable (maybe Longhorn if it's out by then, running on
TCPA-certified Pentium 42 processors), innovation will have been stifled
and it'll be too late to do anything about it.

I still have hope that some form of sense may prevail as there are now
many people and companies that use F/OSS and hopefully, therefore,
policing such an abominable law may be impractical.  But the fact that
all this is being considered -- and now evidently approved -- is
incredibly hard to take.

bye just now,


-- 
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew at agrip.org.uk>