From nick at ccl4.org Tue Mar 6 11:31:10 2001 From: nick at ccl4.org (Nicholas Clark) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:10:53 2004 Subject: Questions about software patenting Message-ID: <20010306173109.M59817@plum.flirble.org> This was the list of questions that I was asked to answer. I'm not sure of some of the best answers to these. As to the last question - "widely known" - I don't know what he's meaning by a legitimate circumvention method. * Can you say something briefly about yourself and your business? * What would be a one-sentence description of the open source philosophy, and why that philosophy is opposed to the patenting of software and business methods? * Does the open source movement support the use of copyright to protect software? If so, how does this differ for them to the use of patents? * What does the open source movement see as the dangers of patenting software? * Is the fact that by filing for a patent a software owner has to put details of their invention into the public domain a source of concern, or is that the whole point of the open source? * What about business methods: are the issues here the same or different? * Do you have any concrete examples of any way in which the patenting of software has had any negative impact on the open source movement? * Have you personally ever been effected by the patenting of software? If so, how? * Have you or your company ever been involved in patent litigation, or received letters demanding royalties for patented software? If so, can you outline how and why that happened, and what the outcome was? * Do you know of any research that has been done to establish the impact of patenting on the open source movement? * IBM takes the view that any company should be free to either patent its software, or to throw it into the open source pool, and says it does itself support the open source movement, and is now developing open source products. Do you feel this choice approach is workable? If not, can you explain why it is not? * As you know, there is move to remove the exclusion from the EPC that currently says software should not be patented as such. However, it is widely known that patent applications can be written that make these exclusions irrelevant. It could be argued, therefore, that the removal of them would only be accepting the status quo and make the situation more transparent. Would you agree? Why? Why not? From chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk Tue Mar 6 13:58:37 2001 From: chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk (Chris Benson) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:10:53 2004 Subject: new location of Kernel Traffic Message-ID: <20010306195837.B26549@beta.home> http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/latest_print.html is the new location of the current Linux Kernel Traffic. Check further up the tree for summaries of Debian, Samba, and some other projects. -- Chris Benson From chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk Sun Mar 11 06:37:59 2001 From: chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk (Chris Benson) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:10:53 2004 Subject: Anyone want to try out OpenBSD? Message-ID: <20010311123759.A11084@beta.home> Hi, I've just got OpenBSD 2.8 for amiga/hp300-400/i386/mac68k/powerpc/vax/ sparc/mvme68k/sun3. Unfortunately it does not install on my portable :-( I'd like to try it on a "normal" machine sometime. Until then, anyone want to give it a go? -- Chris Benson From chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk Sat Mar 24 15:10:27 2001 From: chrisb at jesmond.demon.co.uk (Chris Benson) Date: Wed Aug 4 00:10:53 2004 Subject: general interest in *BSD :-) [dom@semantico.com: Re: [ot] NetBSD] Message-ID: <20010324211027.F21725@beta.home> David Cantrell was asking how to boot NetBSD single user after fscking up an install, but when he tried to recover ... ----- Forwarded message from Dominic Mitchell ----- Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 16:59:15 +0000 From: Dominic Mitchell To: london-pm@lists.dircon.co.uk Subject: Re: [ot] NetBSD X-Warning: Incoming message from The Big Giant Head! X-Os: Linux 2.2.13 i686 X-Uptime: 4:57pm up 6:39, 2 users, load average: 0.15, 0.10, 0.09 Reply-To: london-pm@lists.dircon.co.uk On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 05:53:32PM +0000, David Cantrell wrote: > Summary: > > pwd_mkdb didn't work, so I tried re-installing (it was a fresh install I'd > broken anyway). I then proceded to get very annoyed with the NetBSD > installer, because it doesn't let you go back and correct your stupid > mistakes. And then installed Debian. Wuss. ;-) Actually, you might want to try OpenBSD. I don't think its as stable on sparc as NetBSD, but the installer is loads nicer. I always preferred the NetBSD 1.1 installer, which basically dumped you in a shell and gave you "disklabel", "newfs", "tar" and a couple of others. Very effective. -Dom ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Chris Benson