As you may or may not have heard, there is an ongoing election for European of the Year. And you don’t have to live in the EU to vote.

Florian Mueller (from nosoftwarepatents.com), who led the successful fight against software patents in the EU earlier this year, is one of the nominees. Wouldn’t it be great if he became the winner?

You can vote directly, however you do need to vote in all 10 categories. If you would like some recommendations and background info based on position/trackrecord (particularly when it comes to software patents), take a look here.

Don’t underestimate the power of our huge community.
Let’s, together, make Florian Mueller European of the Year!

When you vote, you’ll still have to confirm your vote by replying to an email automatically sent to you by the EV50 organisation that handles the European of the Year vote thing. And please make sure you only vote exactly once: the system works such that if you try to vote multiple times, all your votes become void.

Thanks, and happy voting!

Moving up the Stack – Forget about Linux on the desktop. The next stage of open-source adoption will occur in enterprise software. An article by Erick Schonfeld, some months ago on Business 2.0. Fab observation:

Rather than being used to improve products, an astounding three-quarters of new license revenue in the enterprise software industry is instead plowed right back into sales and marketing.

That means, as Augustin likes to point out, that the business model of a traditional enterprise software company is effectively to charge customers a ton of money to convince those same customers that they need the software in the first place.

The FFII and NoSoftwarePatents.com have picked up an award for outstanding contribution to software development for their work in blocking European patent legislation, at the CNET Networks UK Technology Awards.

Florian Mueller of NoSoftwarePatents.com and Rufus Pollock of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) received their awards in front of an audience of IT professionals from across the industry at the Hilton Hotel in London.

See the full original article at: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39020387,39222696,00.htm

Another CfP:

“The USC, Simi/Conejo, and UCLA Linux User Groups are proud to announce the 4th annual Southern California Linux Expo scheduled for February 11-12, 2006 at the Westin Hotel near the Los Angeles International Airport. Building on the tremendous success of last three years’ SCALE, we will continue to promote Linux and the Open Source Software community.”

See http://www.socallinuxexpo.com/ for details.

A company in Belgium has a patent-pending system (“SMS2mail”) whereby you can text a word to a free short code and get back more information by email to the address of your choice. So where’s the invention, exactly? ;-)
For further details see this article: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25732

Given the current fuss around Linus and the Linux trademark, I should perhaps clarify that I think intellectual property (IP) is important. Basic copyright and trademarks make sense. Patents also, they give an inventor some time to market their creation.
It just goes horribly wrong with software patents. See my recent post for an idea about where the line can be drawn effectively.