[Fsfe-uk] Slashdot Poll / proposal to save free software

[Samuel Liddicott]

I could do with some help submitting a slashdot story with poll.
I invite readers to comment and help me improve the below.

The aim is to organise at least 1 billion dollars of donations to the 
EFF and/or FSF.

I acknowledge I could do with help on terminology like "open source"

Before any money is taken, the receiving group needs to be ready to 
receive it and use it and this could take months of preparation but I 
want the noise, I want people to be ready to give and the receiving 
organisation to be ready to take it. The terms of the donation must 
permit whatever other uses the money may be needed for if (in being 
successful) the threat of unlimited litigation actually staves off most 
of the lawsuits and therefore expenditure. This implies we select an 
organisation that already has the "right kind of goals" and one that can 
take a vastly increased voting membership (as a safeguard against use of 
funds).

This needs hammering out, perhaps with the EFF before it hits slashdot.

Comments, please.

=======
We know that in "Free Software" FREE refers to freedom and not price.

Retaining this freedom costs time and money, and software patents are 
seen as the biggest threat to open source software development.
The costs of obtaining patents in europe is 50,000 euros [reference 
needed] and defence against bogus patents could likely be in the region 
of 1 million dollars [another ref would be nice]. We've seen the fallout 
of the SCO suit, thankfully they attacked IBM and not small developers 
who could not afford to defend a bogus patent challenge, and have no 
patent collateral to cross-license.

As open source developers who loosely band together for development and 
collaboration, or beneficiaries of such projects. must show that we can 
band together for defence of our freedom. We have seen how powerful 
developers can be when the collaborate for software, now it it is time 
to see how powerful we can be when we collaborate financially and 
politically to challenge the might of all who oppose the freedoms we 
have come to appreciate.

A solution I propose is for all open source developers and users to fund 
an organisation with enough money to litigate any company to death.
* to make it a near certainty that any bogus patent portfolio that 
enters into litigation will lose a few million dollars AND their patent.
* to form a powerful government lobby group

With this in mind, the poll becomes:
1) How much would you donate?
2) Which should the organisation be?

Slashdot doesn't support two dimensional polls, but I propose the EFF 
because it is "non-denominational" and not attached to a particular open 
source license; and for the purpose of this plan the merits of 
X11/MIT/GPL etc are not significant, and because it has supporte such 
defenses in the past [references].

I propose that all those friends and family members to whom we have 
given personal support be encouraged to make a donation.
I propose that personally we donate at least what we saved in operating 
system pricing for one PC, in other words a couple of hundred dollars.
I recognize that many have donated much much more in time and skill, but 
money-as-a-weapon is needed now.

$1 billion / $200 = 5,000,000

Are their five million developers and users worldwide who feel strongly 
enough?

It would be nice to equal MS cash reserve; are there 25 million 
developers and users worldwide?

Sam Liddicott
--
address@hidden
www.liddicott.com