Notes and Jottings

[Lorem Ipsum generator](http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/generator2), I need to remember this one.

The [W3C-sponsored workshop](http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/agenda) arrived, and the outcome is as moribund (for the Internet) as one might have expected. Backwards compatibility was on almost nobody’s agenda (except the web browser *implementors*). Most of the people who presented positions were server-side vendors, and they didn’t care about that, or about things like [MOSE](http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2003/06/25/mose/). It looks like anything that the W3C pick will be as useful to the Internet in general as XForms or SVG have been.

Reactions from [Ian Hickson](http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1086158925&count=1) and [Joe Gregorio](http://bitworking.org/news/3270_Redux).

“Patent damage examples”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3722509.stm. Not just small companies. Software patents really are a major problem. In Dublin, the Green Party and Ivana Bacik from Labour have said that they are against the imposition of software patents.

Go out and vote conscientiously in the EU elections on Thursday!

The “directive on software patents was passed”:http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651,39155028,00.htm. So now it’s going to become far more difficult to reverse. Very annoying, and slightly worrying. I hope I can meet some of these EU election candidates and have a “chat” with them…

+*Update*: The proposal which went through was a compromise, but not generally thought to be one which goes far enough to stop software patents. The only chance to get this reversed now is through a majority vote in the EU parliament.+

+*Update 2*: The proposal “actually didn’t get through”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3726375.stm. Okay, I just don’t know what to think at the moment, I’m going to let the dust clear and see what’s left…+

+According to the BBC site, the proposal came unstuck after EU officials were unable to agree on how many languages patent applications should be converted into. What a trite reason for it to fail, if that’s true!+

+*Update 3*: Okay, the Community Patent was a different issue. The software patenting issue did go through, worse luck for everybody!+

Richard Stallman “is giving a talk about the dangers of software patents”:http://www.ifso.ie/news.html#n7 in the MacNeill theatre in Trinity College (Hamilton Building) at 19:30 on Monday 24 May.

He is in the country as a guest of “IFSO”:http://www.ifso.ie/, and the talk itself has been organised by “TCD Netsoc”:http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/, who have had a number of luminaries to speak over the years (including Richard Stallman himself a few years ago). I wonder if Mary Harney has gotten her invitation yet

Here is the content of my post to Groklaw on the issue:

Of course we dislike it! Well - actually, a lot of IT workers in Ireland are
quite ignorant of the issues, which doesn’t help. I get the feeling that
mainland European IT workers are a lot more politically motivated in general
than those living in Ireland. When it was explained to them, a few people in the
company I work for agreed with my interpretation of the issues, but they hadn’t
even thought about the issues with software patents up until
this.

Richard Stallman is coming to Ireland in about a week, and current
plans include giving his prepared speech, “The Danger of Software Patents”, on
Monday 24 May, which will hopefully help to raise awareness a bit
higher.

Anyway, this is the most stupid ill-advised, ignorant thing our government has done during its years in office in the IT/computers area, that I’m aware of. They’re never not getting my vote again for a long time.

Mary
Harney is chair of the competitiveness forum, and seems to have been the main
instigator of the change (aka harmonisation) in patent laws.

Mary Harney
is the head of the Progressive
Democrats (one of the two parties in the current coalition government). They
pride themselves on being friendly to business, and this is all a natural
extension of that - even if you think this is actually bad for business, large
existing businesses usually don’t think so.

If we’d been watching (but I
certainly wasn’t), this issue was well-flagged in various articles. An interesting article from January has the
following enlightening quote from Mary Harney:

The Irish Presidency recognises that the Community Patent is important for industry, and must be made available to firms at a reasonable cost. It therefore pledges to ‘make every effort to ensure its adoption.’ It also highlights the importance of the directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights and promises to make every effort to achieve a common position within the Council.

A search for “Mary Harney” in the search engine on
that site maps out the current policy quite well.

Groklaw “points out”:http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040513125154288 that Germany may vote against the new patent harmonisation proposals on 17 May, which would be a major blow to the pro-software-patent lobby, as well as a huge relief to me. Thank goodness Germany will prevent Ireland from being its own worst enemy. The council of ministers should never have done that end run around the EU parliament.

Actually, this may not be as good as initially appeared–all this means is that the issue will have to be discussed, rather than passing through without discussion.

Tim Bray “points out the excellent implementation of web services”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/11/ReachPSB which is currently being implemented by “Reach”:http://www.reach.ie/, a branch of the Irish government.

Tim points out a number of facets of this implementation which are quite heartwarming to read. The system is scalable, vendor-independent, secure and accountable. These are all important facets of enterprise-level architecture implementations, and a government should be held to at least that level of quality and engineering.

It is a proud day to see that at least one part of the Irish government is doing the right thing with respect to system deployments. The UK government could learn a thing or two from this

I’m worried about what “Mary Hanafin said in this article”:http://www.enn.ie/frontpage/news-9410098.html about using “open standards” rather than open source. Now, I don’t have any problem at all with their using proprietary software. But they do have to be open standards in more than one way, and I’m not sure that this has been picked up by her. There’s open as in having the specification of the standard available, and having the software written to the standard rather than “extending and embracing”. But there’s also the spectre of software patents hanging over this as well. All of the standards in use *must* be free of software patents to really be considered an open standard. I have a bad feeling about some of this…

“Doc Searls”:http://doc.weblogs.com/ is just across the canal in the Old Schoolhouse. How handy is that I’m off to say hi now (and probably to stay for a few drinks too).