A Bad Day To Bury Good News
“...thorough analysis, genuinely concerned citizens and factual information have more impact than free ice-cream, boatloads of hired lobbyists and outsourcing threats" -- Jonas Maebe, Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. (source)
Today the focus of the news was on the Olympic bids...and it will be for the next few days. But we must not let one piece of news be buried under the breathless “we never doubted the Olympic committee for a minute” stories and photographs of attractive young girls wearing few clothes dancing in Trafalgar Square.
This news can speak for itself: “European politicians have thrown out a controversial bill that could have led to software being patented.” (source)
An article (here), written before the surprise ditching of the bill, gives us a glimpse of the fury the bill provoked. It points out that “Nobody who actually writes or cares about software supported this directive, but nobody in a position to stop it cared about software except as a cash cow, or cared about its producers except as ever-ready battery hens to be intensively farmed.” The same site responded initially to the bill’s destruction in the article linked in our initial quote, above. (And just who the hell are the ‘Campaign for Creativity’, mentioned in the article and who supported the bill? Just the thought of this makes my skin blister.)
This, folks, is a rare victory and we must cherish it... although one drop of acid can be found in the well. The bill was not dropped because they realised it was fundamentally and malevolently wrong; it is far more likely that it was politically inconvenient to give in to the lobbyists; they realised that not all the bill’s opponents were as toothless as they may have expected and could potentially cause them grief later on. This is the case for many decisions we hear from the courts, be they favourable to us or not.
Whatever the reason, though, a small cloud of gloom has now been lifted. The software industry can remain a forward-looking and innovative bunch of enthusiastic and knowledgeable geeks, rather than decline into a castrated and effete colony of code slaves run by obscene CB-toadying bastards who stuff fifty pound notes into their ears.
Today the focus of the news was on the Olympic bids...and it will be for the next few days. But we must not let one piece of news be buried under the breathless “we never doubted the Olympic committee for a minute” stories and photographs of attractive young girls wearing few clothes dancing in Trafalgar Square.
This news can speak for itself: “European politicians have thrown out a controversial bill that could have led to software being patented.” (source)
An article (here), written before the surprise ditching of the bill, gives us a glimpse of the fury the bill provoked. It points out that “Nobody who actually writes or cares about software supported this directive, but nobody in a position to stop it cared about software except as a cash cow, or cared about its producers except as ever-ready battery hens to be intensively farmed.” The same site responded initially to the bill’s destruction in the article linked in our initial quote, above. (And just who the hell are the ‘Campaign for Creativity’, mentioned in the article and who supported the bill? Just the thought of this makes my skin blister.)
This, folks, is a rare victory and we must cherish it... although one drop of acid can be found in the well. The bill was not dropped because they realised it was fundamentally and malevolently wrong; it is far more likely that it was politically inconvenient to give in to the lobbyists; they realised that not all the bill’s opponents were as toothless as they may have expected and could potentially cause them grief later on. This is the case for many decisions we hear from the courts, be they favourable to us or not.
Whatever the reason, though, a small cloud of gloom has now been lifted. The software industry can remain a forward-looking and innovative bunch of enthusiastic and knowledgeable geeks, rather than decline into a castrated and effete colony of code slaves run by obscene CB-toadying bastards who stuff fifty pound notes into their ears.
posted by Jamie at 4:17 PM
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