Re: [Fsfe-uk] GPL licence untested, authors could lose their rights in UK

[MJ Ray]

Ian Lynch <address@hidden>
> On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 07:27 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> > Once again, "the East of England, Europe's hotbed for innovation
> > in science, technology and research" which already "has the
> > highest per capita expenditure on R&D in the UK" is ignored.
> 
> Isn't that just that Cambridge is in the East of England ;-)

That's probably the biggest and best known hub, but there's a
lot of software stuff clustered around Adastral Park, Martlesham
Heath (telecomms-related), Norwich/S.Norfolk (animation and
engineering in particular) and south Bedfordshire.  In general,
software and electronic publishing is "the largest of the
creative industries in the East of England and a clear specialism
of the region, which is home to many of the UK's main software
houses as well as a host of SMEs." (East of England Creative
Industries: Advice and Analysis, DTZ Pieda Consulting and City
University London, for Living East).

> > Does that suggest the target audience for these events aren't
> > the firms who are developing Free Software, but the big city
> > commercial suppliers who will just trade in popular packages
> > and want to avoid doing any compensation work to repair errors
> > in the software they deploy, if they can avoid it?
> 
> Its probably aimed at suppliers and distributors primarily because they
> are the ones that are taking the "risk" - that is assuming that there is
> any more significant risk than with proprietary stuff. If you want to
> fill up a seminar, London is the place to do it. [...]

Sure, that's the point: this isn't aimed at developers who know
what's going on with software licensing.

Not to take away anything from London, but just like the
UK Patent Office's infamous "not a consultation" software patent
consultations, these events aren't aimed at software developers,
else they'd visit the East of England too.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray - personal email, see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/  irc.oftc.net/slef  Jabber/SIP ask