[openstandaarden] Brussels demonstration announce: do nothesitate to forward

[David GLAUDE]

Tijl Vercaemer wrote:

> Da's juist, maar OpenStandaarden is dus tegen patenten op standaarden.  Dat is 
> een soort software patent, maar software patenten gaan over veel meer dan 
> dat.  Dat iemand bijvoorbeeld een patent heeft op tabs in menu's is eigenlijk 
> geen zaak voor OpenStandaarden. 

Well I do believe User Interface do require some standardisation too.
And those standard need to be "open". Standard is not only about file 
format, protocol and such...

Back to User interface.

A user expect the File menu to contain such and such...
The user expect the first letter to be underline and ALT+Letter to be a 
shortcurt. Human do want standardisation and get use to an interface, so 
in order to be acceptable a program must "look" familiar.

In the use, there was a copyright issue about menu system. Actually many 
"Look & Feel" legal attack took place in the US (I don't know about europe).
Program A was using the same "have the two first letter underline" that 
program B was using. And guess what... A did win in court.

So User Interface might be attack by Copyright understand by a stupid 
judge and also by ill Software Patent.

> Het zou volgens mij verwarrend zijn als onze 
> eerste persmededeling over patenten gaat, in plaats van over open 
> standaarden. Als we nu al een min of meer gekende organisatie zouden zijn 
> zouden we ons dat kunnen permiteren, maar ik denk dat we dat nu best nog niet 
> doen...
> (al kunnen we onze eerste persmededeling natuurlijk ook niet eeuwig 
> uitstellen)
> 
> Tijl

David GLAUDE

PS: EUCD could also be used (secure API) to make interoperability 
impossible... so you should be against it too.


-- 
Not only I am back from vacation with zillions of mail to read...
But my mailbox was full and some mail may have been rejected in the
morning of 19 August 2003. So wait or resend if I do not react soon.
It also mean I could have missed some mailing-list message. :-(