🚀 go-pugleaf

I'll be in Portland, OR from Monday, 12 August to Sunday, September 1,
1991.  One reason is a vacation with my in-laws.  Another is that I
need to speak to computer professionals and the general public about
the threat that Software Patents and Interface Copyrights pose to the
computer industry and society in general.

LPF needs me to speak to the largest audiences available.  It is
better for me to talk to a meeting of 200 PC users, then a meeting of
10 Unix administrators.

I am willing to travel to Seattle or Vancouver for a few days each.
Or elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, if the audience is large
enough.  I am open to speaking morning, afternoon, and evening, as
well as lunchtime seminars and dinner meetings.  I would like my
schedule in the cities other then Portland (my family would like to
see some of me ;-) to be as fill as possible.  I am probably not
available to speak from Friday August 23rd to Sunday August 25th.

It would be ideal if someone would step forward to coordinate my
speaking in each city, make local arrangements, including advertising
the talks.

Please forward this message to others who might be able to arrange
talks.

I appended a description of what I'll be speaking on.

thanx -len


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	     LEONARD TOWER OF THE LEAGUE FOR PROGRAMMING FREEDOM
				       
		   Protecting the Freedom to Write Software
      (How Patents and Interface Copyrights Hamper Software Development)
				       


Leonard Tower is an activist member of the League for Programming Freedom, a
grassroots organization of programmers and users fighting to bring back the
freedom to write programs.

Specifically, the League aims to abolish two recently established forms of
monopoly which restrict programmers' freedom to do their work: interface
copyright and software patents.  The 600 or so League members include
professors, students, entrepreneurs, and users, but primarily professional
programmers.

In the field of software, Leonard Tower is best known for working to develop
the free UNIX-compatible software system known as GNU.  His specific
contributions include early work on the GNU C Compiler and being the GNU
Project's chief electronic communicator.  Like many other software developers,
he fears that the new monopolies will make his work impossible to continue.

New monopolies threaten the freedom of programmers to continue doing their
work.  Copyrighted interfaces prohibit supporting the commands users know and
expect.  Patented algorithms and techniques make each design decision carry
the risk of a lawsuit.  Formerly limited to the US and a few other countries,
these problems now threaten to spread to the rest of the world.

Leonard Tower will talk about how these monopolies originated in the US, how
they are being pressed on other countries, and why they are bad for computer
users and programmers.  He will then suggest what we can do to prevent them.
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enjoy -len

PS: By the way, what do you think of look-and-feel lawsuits?