Attention Free Software Users in the U.S.

[Erwin Rol]

I would like to add that this is not just a concern for U.S. Free 
Software Users/Developers. Just like in the U.S. the politicians in 
other parts of the world are just a clueless, meaning that if a law like 
this gets passed in the U.S. it will just be a mather of time untill it 
will be proposed and accepted in the rest of the world.

A good example of this is the upcoming patent laws in the European 
Union, eventhough a fast majority of ppl is against it ( 
http://petition.eurolinux.org/index_html?LANG=en ) , the voices of big 
U.S. firms weight more heavy than that of general public, and so most 
likely the ill formed U.S. software patent system will be copied in Europe.

To Prevent the same happening to law like the D.M.C.A and now the 
(luckily not yet passed) C.B.D.T.P.A, i would advice for ppl outside the 
U.S. to be extermly alert for simulair proposuls in the rest of the world.

An other hot topic at the moment in Germany is yet and other bunch of 
clueless politicians thinking they will beable to stop "illegal" content 
in the internet by forced censorship. I advice people in germany to sign 
the petition against that. http://odem.org/informationsfreiheit/en/

- Erwin Rol

Joel Sherrill wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I don't step up on a political soapbox very often but this time 
> it is necessary.  U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings has proposed an
> an ill conceived piece of legislation known as the "Consumer 
> Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act."  As written
> could lead to the outlawing of open source software.  
> 
> I encourage all of you to read up on this bill and doing what you
> feel is "The Right Thing To Do(tm)".  The Linux Weekly News
> (http://www.lwn.net/) has a good writeup which includes a
> discussion of how this bill would result in GNU/Linux distributions
> being illegal in the U.S.  That write-up also includes a link
> to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's newsletter which in 
> turn contains a link to a form where the Senate Judiciary Committee
> is taking online comments
> 
>    http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/input_form.cfm?comments=1
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> And now back to the regular technical content. :)
> 



-- 
         Q - S O F T - E N G I N E E R I N G

Erwin Rol (Software Engineer)     phone: +49-89-68050051
Erwin.Rol at Q-Soft-Engineering.com  fax  : +49-89-68050052