On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 16:03 +0100, Nick Daniels wrote:
Hi A bit off topic, but found this regarding Labour Manifesto:
Finally, a small section headed "Copyright in a digital age" may or may not be ominous. "We will modernise copyright and other forms of protection of intellectual property rights so that they are appropriate for the digital age," it says. Which is something we're all in favour of, but we fear they may disagree with us on what is "appropriate". It continues: "We will use our presidency of the EU [this expires on 31st December, so we'll hear about it very soon] to look at how to ensure content creators can protect their innovations in a digital age. Piracy is a growing threat and we will work with industry to protect against it." This does not sound like good news, necessarily. Still anything that might stop Alastair Campbell's minions nicking other people's dossiers off the Internet surely isn't all bad. ®
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/labour_2005_manifesto/
Not wanting to get political, since it's not necessarily wise on a list like this, but since I still class myself as an undecided voter I don't feel I am pushing my personal political views by commenting on the fact that the Green party appears to be the only party that really gets the issues of patents and open source software - rather than paying lip service on the whole (talking party wide here rather than on an individual basis).
Try Google'ing for:
"patents" site:www.greenparty.org.uk
or
"open source" site:www.greenparty.org.uk
They also host on Debian and Apache and use PHP, although they also have the disclaimer:
THE MATERIAL PRESENTED ON THIS SITE IS NOT NECESSARILY GREEN PARTY POLICY NOR ENDORSED BY THE GREEN PARTY
on the site!
Whether that is of any real value in practise is anyones guess, but then that's politics and big business for you!
I'll re-iterate that I'm making an informational comment here and not looking to start a political debate - for my part don't turn this into one please :)