🚀 go-pugleaf

wolfgang@wsrcc.com (Wolfgang S. Rupprecht) wrote:
>    If certain computer companies want to actively promote non-cooperation
>    by playing invalid patent games so be it.  I am quite willing to play
>    along.  Here is my contribution to the cause:
>
>    Until further notice, any usenet articles posted to or received by
>    this machine for groups dealing with Coherent, Apple, or AT&T
>    computers will be bit-bucketed.  No articles in any of these groups
>    will be sent up or down stream to any site.

Are you kidding? The tone of your posting leads me to believe that you
are serious, and are proposing a general boycott of discussion groups
related in any way to computer systems built by companies engaged in
dishonest patent claims.

I agree with you (and nearly everyone else in this thread) about
software patents: certainly patents like the byte-sex patent are prima
facie invalid for being obvious and for prior art. It's alarming that
the Patent Office is unable to see this, and more dangerous that the
litigation/cross-license system will allow the holders of bad patents
to harass and deform the development of software. Maybe the law is
wrong (as the FSF say), or maybe there should be some system of
software patents == but clearly the existing system isn't fair and
isn't working.

But your boycott idea is something completely different. Shutting down
newsgroups would boycott the wrong people -- users & programmers --
not the corporate lawyers and managers who are at fault.

If you are furious at Apple (say), then trying to boycott Apple might
be justified ethically (if you were mad with a good reason, of
course), but it wouldn't be effective. Apple is too big to be hurt.

A boycott of Apple-related newsgroups, on the other hand, would have
a totally negligeable effect on Apple`s revenues. It'd be very
effective in frustrating the users and developers who are completely
innocent in this controversy.