[FYI] <Rant on> MICROSOFT, SWPAT etc. pp <Rant off>

["Axel H Horns" <horns@t-online.de>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/991221-000005.html

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Posted 21/12/99 10:41am by Graham Lea

  Nader slams MS pricing, licences, demands Office
  ports

Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who brought General Motors to its 
knees over car safety failures ("Unsafe at any speed"), has been 
talking and writing about Microsoft's "poorly designed products" that 
were "prone to crash" at the Bazaar, an open source software event in 
New York. He drew attention to the narrowness of the DoJ case, which 
ignored "a plethora of issues" relating to the desktop monopoly, MS 
Office, and licensing issues. Nader has previously arranged two 
conferences on Microsoft which focussed public attention on the 
company. Nader is much admired by Microsoft president Steve Ballmer's 
mother, who was concerned that her son was doing something that was 
criticised by her hero.  

[...]

Rant on: Stallman is right, and this is a very important issue 
indeed. Software patents issued by a maverick patent office, such as 
the US Patent and Trademark Office, should be overturned, and in the 
interim, they should not be recognised elsewhere. The European Patent 
Office shows signs of similar weakening towards software patents in 
the face of pressure from corporate patents lawyers desiring to lock-
up intellectual property that properly belongs to the world, and not 
to corporations. The Association for Computing Machinery never 
envisaged that the algorithms it published be patented, for example, 
and nothing has changed. It would be a good if WTO member states 
negotiated that if the US wants TRIPS (the trade-related aspects of 
intellectual property rights) to be extended, it should reign-in its 
abuses of intellectual property patenting. Rant off 

[...]

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