On March 7 2005, the European Community Council Presidency declared the software agreement of 18 May 2004 was adopted after much lobbying from the proprietary software industry, especially large US based companies.
It is clear that extending the Patentability of Software to Europe is a clear and direct threat to Open Source software. It was also made clear that the software agreement which had been adopted was initially drafted by Microsoft and BSA "experts", who have a lot of reasons to try to stop the progress of Open Source Software development.
The web site of the EICTA to which those companies [1] belong was among the group of lobbyist who derailed the Council process in order to get Patentability of Software in the EU, as their web site stated on March 7 2005:
07/03/2005: EICTA welcomed today's decision by the EU Competitiveness Council to adopt a Common Position on the proposed Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions.This is a direct frontal attack from those companies on my work, and on the normal process of the european institutions.
As an individual I am only left with the right to express my disagreement, which I will do by not helping those companies make use of the Open Source Software they decided to threaten. I hope you will then understand why they won't get further technical information or support from me or my servers, but it is still possible to contact my employer to try to get paying contractual support.
I regret this state of affairs, I always worked to provide information and help free to anybody, but I didn't find any other way to express my disagreement to the involved parties, any direct mail or letter on the topic are unlikely to even get read.
Sincerely yours,
Daniel Veillard daniel@veillard.com
[1] This list of companies includes: IBM, Apple, Cisco, Alcatel, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Bull, Intel, HP, Adobe, Fujitsu, SAP, Siemens, Sony and Motorola.