Thursday, July 07, 2005

Europe says no to software patents

On July 6, the European parliament decided
by a large majority to reject the software patents directive.
This is great news for the FOSS community and open software
innovation in general. The patent directive was a looming threat for
software innovation in Europe, since it threatened to bring
into legislation, the US style practice of supporting patents
in software and business processes.

Redhat and Sun Microsystems worked with the
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) to bring about this victory for those who value free and
open source software.

This should be a blow to Microsoft's business aspirations in Europe
and should help the Linux community.