Subject: Munich Going Forward with GNU/Linux Migration -
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> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040811094816824

Munich Going Forward with Linux

Wednesday, August 11 2004 @ 09:48 AM EDT

Heise is reporting that Munich's mayor has held a press conference, in which
he said that the bidding process for the switch from Windows to Linux will
go forward as originally planned, despite patent issues. Thanks to Matthias
for spotting this first.

Mayor Ude, who said he's been thinking it over for a few days, says there
will be a legal study completed by Autumn concerning the migration, and if
it looks safe, they will go forward and meanwhile the bidding begins.
Munich, he said, wants to stay with its commitment to Linux. He also
announced that the city is going to request a legal study on the question of
what consequences the EU-directive on the patentability of
"computer-implemented inventions" will have in the current version of the
Council of Ministers's proposed law.

A translator is at work, and I'll have more for you later.

As promised, here is the meat of it, translated by tglx:

"Despite legal ambiguity and continuous fears of a patent war around open
source, Munich's Mayor Christian Ude wants to start the bidding procedure
for the replacement of the desktop OS in the city administration. Ude
announced this at a press conference in the city hall. The LiMux project
goes into the active migration phase. A survey of the patent issue will be
finished by autumn. If the conversion to Linux appears then harmless, the
bidding can be started. The city wants to stay with its commitment to Linux
without fail: "It's irreversible that the city of Munich has decided in
favour of open source."

"Ude announced that the city will award a contract for a legal opinion to
clarify the question of which effects the disputed European Union guideline
to the patenting of "computer-implemented inventions" in its present version
of the Council of Ministers could have. Ude requested information from the
Federal Government, why they voted in Brussels against the directive which
was given by the European parliament. This directive was clearly against the
broad software patent legalization and was accepted by the Federal
Government before the final decision in the European Council of Ministers.
If the Federal Government in Berlin wants to support open source projects,
as emphasized by the Federal Department of Justice last week, they must
provide legal security for the public and private efforts. Furthermore Ude
requested other cities, municipalities and authorities, which work on Linux
migrations, to join and support Munich in its efforts to clarify the legal
situation. The argumenets and the demands on the Federal Government have
been submitted in written form by the city of Munich.

". . . . In a strong reaction to the interruption of the project, the Free
Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and LinuxTag e.V. warned at the beginning
of the week against the abuse of software patents 'for psychological
warfare' in the economy. 'Mechanisms from the Cold War are now adapted to
protect the interests of companies', said Olive Zendel, chairman of
LinuxTag. 'The principle of nuclear deterrence is replaced by patent
armament, where companies arrange non-aggression pacts by cross licencing of
the patents. The one who suffer are the programmers, small and medium-size
enterprises and thus the economic situation in Europe.'"

He also provides us a link to the official statement, in German, of course
(http://www.muenchen.de/vip8/prod1/mde/_de/rubriken/Rathaus/40_dir/presse/pressemeldungen/linux_pressepapier.pdf),
and a translation of important bits:

1. Munich continues
Munich continues to work on the LiMux project

2. Munich requests clarifying
Legal opinion is requested to clarify the difference between the
software patent decisions of the European Parliament and the European
Council of Ministers.

Munich requests a clear and unambiguous wording of the terms concerning
the software patents.

Munich requests an answer from the Federal Government why the change of
the European Parliment decision is necessary at all and why the Ministery of
Justice claims that the new decision of the European Council of Ministers is
not affecting the Open Source community and small/mid sized companies. If
there is no difference to the decision of the European Parliament, then the
Government should explain why a change of this decision is necessary at all.

Munich requests legal security for public and private investments

3. Munich seeks support

Munich asks the affected cities, ministeries and companies to support
its claims and efforts.

Infoworld also has some details:

"In a press statement issued on August 4, the city administration
confirmed it was 'standing by Linux,' correcting press reports that the
project had been put on ice. Mayor Christian Ude stated that his
administration's IT experts had recently presented 'strategic outlines' of
the Linux project to officials from Augsburg and Nuernberg. Ude noted that
there was 'interest in Munich's open source solution' from these German
cities as well as from Vienna.

"Ude confirmed that the call for tenders for the base client had been
temporarily delayed to examine the technical and legal risks presented by
the draft software patents directive which, he said, provided for large
scale patenting of software.

"All European local administrations and companies that are interested in
open source software should work to ensure that the planned legislation does
not become EU law, Ude said. In this sense, he is in complete agreement with
the decision of the European Parliament to restrict the scope of the
directive."

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Reader Letter: Don't Believe "IPR" Hype

> http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/08/12/2003198441 Letter Don't believe IPR hype Alex Macfie Thursday, Aug 12, 2004,Page 8 Taiwan would be shooting itself in the foot if it were to go down the American route of ever-broader and stronger intellectual property protection, as suggested by Honigmann Hong and Lu Yi-hsun ("IPR should drive our tech-based economy," page 8, Tuesday, Aug. 10). In the US this approach is beginning to be questioned -- last autumn the US Federal Trade Commission produced a report suggesting that the extension of patent protection in the US to cover software and business methods has been a failure. The report suggests what most software developers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) know already -- that innovation in IT is driven by competition, not by patentability, and that patents actually impede development in that field. Clearly, then, it spectacularly fails Hong and Lu's test to "find an equilibrium between technological development and technological dissemination." The article says that IBM collected "over US$1 billion" in license fees for its patents in 2001. But it misses the fact that the great majority of these patents are on programming methods that IT professionals regard as trivial -- ideas that would occur naturally to them and which certainly were not the result of expensive and time-consuming research. For example, one of IBM's patents is on the idea of marking text in a word-processor in different colors for correcting. As well as IBM, Microsoft uses patents to bully potential competitors; indeed Microsoft has openly stated its intention to use the patent system to drive Linux out of the software market. Other patents are held by companies whose sole business is litigating over patents. Currently, Web sites are being threatened by Acacia,which holds a patent on the principle of playing music and movies directly on the Web. Another company, E-Data, is suing (legal) online music download services over its patent on downloading data on the Internet. A British company, the "British Technology Group," is now suing Microsoft and Apple over its patent on downloading software updates from the Internet. Yet another company, Divine, has extracted license fees from "e-retailers" over its patent on selling things over the Internet. It is important to remember that these firms contributed nothing to the innovations to which they claim exclusive ownership. Instead they are playing the patent system like a lottery, patenting obvious ideas in the hope that they will become widely used. Such is the nature of software "licensing" patents, or, as it is better characterized, legalized extortion. As US economics professor Brian Kahin notes in his essay called "Information Process Patents in the US and Europe," "The licensing market [for software patents], such as it is, seems to be characterized by patentees looking for infringers, rather than productive companies looking for technology." It should be no surprise that there is great resistance within the EU to proposals to adopt an American-style patenting regime on new technologies there. If patents such as those mentioned above were to be made legally valid in the EU or Taiwan, the result would be a net outflow of license fees to the US and Japan, where most new technology patents are held. These "license fees" are money which would otherwise be spent on developing new innovative products. Software and media piracy is undoubtedly a serious problem in Taiwan, albeit completely unrelated to patents. But adopting a US-style copyright regime, and in particular laws such as the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is not the solution. This law outlaws many ordinary consumer practices, and makes criminals out of ordinary honest citizens -- but would do nothing to prevent piracy. For example, the US law makes it illegal for consumers to try to bypass region-locks on legitimately-purchased DVDs. There is no copyright law anywhere in the world which makes it illegal to play a movie legitimately purchased in another country, at least for one's personal entertainment. By making it illegal to bypass any technology designed to control access to content, this law overrides all safeguards in copyright law. Clearly it is not intended to stop piracy, but instead to enshrine the business models of the American movie studios. It is not in Taiwan's best interests, therefore, that this law be adopted here. Taiwan should continue to be a nation built on innovation, rather than try to play the intellectual property litigation game of the US and Japan -- a game which it is sure to lose. -- DRM is Theft! We are the Stakeholders! New Yorkers for Fair Use http://www.nyfairuse.org [CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights.

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Re: Reader Letter: Don't Believe "IPR" Hype

Hartmut Pilch wrote: > > > Taiwan should continue to be a nation built on innovation, rather than try > > Just a sidenote: I don't know whether Alex wanted to get embroiled in the > discussion about nation-building in Taiwan. There is already a state > called "Republic of China" on Taiwan, which ruled the mainland until 1949 > and is not in a hurry to reunite under undemocratic conditions, but by far > not everybody in Taiwan would agree that there must be a taiwanese nation > state in the long term. > > Btw I have a Chinese book hyping software patents, written by an author > from Taiwan and spread by patent lawyer friends on the mainland recently, > but haven't found the time to report about it. They quote the great > achievements of their german patent lawyer friends in softening caselaw > and making everything patentable. This is important for them, because > both sides of the Taiwan strait have german law and caselaw, including > phrases about forces of nature, in their patentability statutes. Now they > are pointing to Germany as the authoritative country that is giving up on > limiting patentability. So we need some more articles there that point to > the reversal of this tide, as seen in the EP vote of last year. We are > seeing far too little echo of this (also in the US, where EFF and Pubpat > are focussing attention on the novelty of individual patents and failing > to combine this with the general fight against swpat which isn't over > anywhere and will never be). I think some education regarding the "no difference between hardware and software" analysis needs to be put out, to policymakers, advocates and constituencies. A lot of people get conned by software patent promoters who put out this line. We do get a lot of people who hear the argument that there's no difference between software and hardware and conclude that it affects the question of whether software is patentable. They think that it's about whether it's "hard" or "soft" (physical vs. "less so"), rather than that it's about abstract processes regardless of the form in which they are represented. In truth, as instructions devised for generic logic devices, software is inherently abstract. Seth -- DRM is Theft! We are the Stakeholders! New Yorkers for Fair Use http://www.nyfairuse.org [CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights.

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Straight Up on Software Patents in Europe

One might think that drawing a distinction between "computer-implemented inventions" and software "as such" is merely ridiculous, because a patent on software in a device isn't limited to that device. A patent on software in a device is a patent everywhere -- because software is abstract. However, attempting to enact a law for all the Member States of the European Union by pretending to set limits on patenting software, putting so much perverse effort into deceptively codifying a practice that is so plainly at odds with everyday common sense, is not merely absurd, it's obscene. The whole "Directive on Computer-Implemented Inventions" enterprise is an enormous, coordinated act of criminal duplicity. No matter how much they say they're preventing patents on software "as such," the software patent directive sets no limitations whatsoever on patentability. What they really mean is that they don't want there to be software "as such" that we can presume is free of patents. They don't want us to have the presumption that we may use abstract logic freely. You either allow software patents, or you don't. You either allow people to patent abstraction, or you don't. It doesn't matter what language you express it in; it doesn't matter that you express it in words or numbers on a page or in a file on a hard drive or on a website or in a field programmable gate array: it still translates into pure, ideal, abstract logical processes. Everybody who uses a computer to create programs knows that it's a special machine designed to process abstract logic. Everybody who owns a computer can use and express pure logic in code and execute those processes without regard for whether anybody else might have declared that they have a claim to them because they happen to use them in a device. No. If you want to patent abstractions, then present a Directive that says so. Tell us outright that you want people to be able to lay claim to algorithms by putting them in a device. Don't tell us that you won't patent software "as such." That isn't just confusion -- that's criminal intent to deceive and defraud those you purport to represent. Seth -- [CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights.

Subject: Munich Going Forward with GNU/Linux Migration -msg#00003