NationStates Jolt Archive

After cruuising other forums I ran across this snippet and it quite frankly upset me. Here is an edited version of the text I copied;

"The European government bodies are considering making it mandatory to patent software before it can be released. The rules behind this would severely cripple or even completely disable programmers' ability to produce open source and public domain software, as well as limiting the variety that end-users have to choose their software from".

This may sound like a lot of hype, but take into account the amount of open-source software that websites use. PHP is open source. Even if a patent were implemented for PHP itself, every script one writes would have to be patented. These patent laws, could, in effect, make it illegal to view websites and indeed, any forums currently coded in PHP, from European countries. maybe this is a 'worst case' maybe it's a lot of hype. I do not have enough programming knowledge to figure this out. So I went with the herd and signed it.

Thank you for your time and please click the below link to sign the petition. Or please tell me why I'm screwed up.

http://petition.eurolinux.org/signatures.html

Linux is open source.

This would make Linux unavailable in any country that has this law.
This means you would be stuck with Microsoft products, and they would very definately have a monopoly.

Am I getting this right, that this would mean an end to open-source programs? Eeeeep!

You could just elect never to prosecute anyone for Copyright Violation...