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User talk:Ciaran

Where's the Explanation?

Why has that unnecessary and irrelevant quote been replaced in the Apple article? It's not related to patents. It doesn't express Apple's corporate philosophy. It's out of context.

Where's the "explanation" of its replacement you mentioned, I can't find this? No other company on this site, as far as I have been able to determine, is treated to a gratuitous lead-in quote on what is supposed to be a fact-based page—that's the impression you gave me, correct me if I'm mistaken here—to blatantly suggest that they condone "stealing". This is inappropriate, Ciaran. Either you're going to be even-handed and accurate here, or you're not. There's no need for that quote, it adds nothing to a discussion of Apple and patents.

I'd suggest that, having perpetrated the sorts of inaccuracies that I found on the Apple page here when I arrived, that it would be a show of good faith on your part to see that it's squeaky clean. I've assisted you here by providing you with the facts you lacked. I compromised with you on some of the other wording insofar as it continued to reflect at least an arguable view of reality. This is too much, it's looking like axe-grinding again.

By the way, you might want to correct @gnufreex on identi.ca: he's been running around now claiming that I "removed evidence" from the Apple page here, and that is obviously—as you know—a complete fabrication.

It's about using other people's ideas, and patents are about making barriers to using other people's ideas, so the quote is relevant. But OK, I'll meet you half way and will move it to another page. Your highlighting of errors in that page is indeed significant and useful.
I'll try to make it clearer that rather than endorsing stealing, he seems to have been explaining that using other people's ideas isn't stealing - it's just part of development.
We should probably be having these conversations on Talk:Apple Inc.. Other users would be more likely to see these discussions there. Ciaran 05:03, 11 October 2010 (EDT)
That's fine. Further discussions can be conducted there once this is settled. Ciaran, regardless of the bent of this site, "patents are about making barriers to using other people's ideas" is an editorial position on your part. Make up your mind whether this site is fact-based or editorial in intent. "That's where the money is!" could be a quote about litigating patent infringement cases, but it's not: it's a quote from Willie Sutton, explaining why he robbed banks. Again: intellectually dishonest. Cherry-picking.
My highlighting of egregious, obvious and wrong-headed errors has not merely been "significant and useful", although I thank you for acknowledging that. When you consider that some of those more interested in anti-Apple rhetoric than facts have been running around—based on the completely erroneous content promulgated on this site—claiming that "Apple has patented LLVM and is planning on suing anyone who uses it", I'd gently suggest to you that the page could be construed as having been deliberately defamatory. Especially since the choice and presentation of the material, as it originally stood, suggested, rightly or wrongly, a complete and utter lack of due diligence on the part of the site's owner/editor (that would be you), since clearly, the patents cited had never actually been read by you or anyone else, the patents were miscast with erroneous information about what they referred to, etc.

Account rename

Oh, hi, could you please rename my username to “Martin”? — Martin Roppelt 00:23, 5 May 2009 (EDT)

The easiest thing would be to just make a new "Martin" account. There are no edits attached to the "Martin Roppelt" account, so you're losing nothing. Ciaran 06:22, 5 May 2009 (EDT)

Offer to Help

Hey Ciaran, I read about you and would like to help by helping translate the wiki. My mother tongue is german, but i wasn't able to find a IRC Chan/Mailadress or something else to turn to. How to get involved?

mfg dRp3pP3r

Thanks for this offer. We don't have a German wiki available yet, and the articles on this English version aren't mature enough to be really worth translating. Maybe in a month or two's time, we'll be looking for English->German translation help.
BUT, we do need help from German speakers right now. There's a lot of information about software patents in German, and I can't read German. If you could contribute information in English, based on your ability to read German documents, that would be really helpful. I review all pages daily, so I can review the grammar etc. if that's helpful.
Examples of German documents that probably contain interesting info:
If you could expand those topics, that would be great. Or if English->German is your focus, then I hope I'll be able to contact you in a few weeks/months when (if) we launch a de.swpat.org. Ciaran 04:10, 6 May 2009 (EDT)

Test for main page

Hi,

Your User:Ciaran/test new main page looks a bit scrappy, so I did a tidier version: User:Ciaran/alt test for main page. Basically, reduced the bulk of it to two divs for left and right columns, and turned off the TOC so you can still use section headings. 83.104.46.71 07:26, 25 May 2009 (EDT)

I have now grouped it under four broad headings, see User:Steelpillow/Test1. I'd like to move some of the less top-level lists to their own pages, so the Main Page can shrkin a little. Any objections? Steelpillow 08:10, 26 May 2009 (EDT)
No objections. I was thinking along the same lines. As the content fills out and the needed headings become clear, the front page should probably be reduced to a dozen or so links, with "Countries and regions" having their own page etc.
Another change I'd consider is to use Wikipedia's Portals technology (where people create alternative start pages catering to people interested in specific topics, such as free software), that way we could have Portal:Europe as a starting point for people only/mainly interested in the situation in Europe, and another for USA, for Latin America, etc. That doesn't preclude what you're proposing, but it's an organisational option worth keeping in mind. Ciaran 08:24, 26 May 2009 (EDT)
Well, I am not sure why Wikipedia also has an ordinary article on free software. Maybe it's worth duplicating topics when the site gets big and the user base massively diverse and active, but it would be a lot of extra work here for (IMHO) not much gain. If visitors want special info about Europe, why not just put it in an article called Europe? Another feature of Wikipedia's portals is that they use a special Portal namespace. Such custom namespaces are not searched by default, and a user has to modify their preferences in order to search a given namespace. IMHO this is not very user-friendly, and I for one seldom visit portals precisely for this reason. Maybe a site admin can set the site default for new users to make a given namespace searchable, in which case the problem can be overcome at the expense of other visitors, not interested in the specialised portal zone, having their searches filled with portal hits and having to turn the portal search off. IMHO portals are something of a lose-lose option for us, at least for the foreseeable future. Steelpillow 16:38, 27 May 2009 (EDT)

Wanted categories

Special:Wantedcategories lists categories which have been added to articles, but do not actually exist. Looking at them, they are a pretty scrappy bunch. Do you want any of them created? Otherwise, I'll remove the links from the relevant articles. steelpillow 14:39, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

Scrappy is right. The "broken citations" category is automatically generated, so there's no way to delete that. (I must finish the work on getting citations working...) The rest can all be removed.
(Thinking out load: FWIW, those categories were conceived to solve a real problem. They didn't solve the problem, so they can be removed, but something similar will be put in place some day. Problem: Do I make a page for all citations? Or do I put the SME citations on the SME page, the innovation citations on the innovation page, etc.? I want both, but maintaining two sets of sets of citations is foolish, so we have to decided where citations should go and how a link can somehow be made between where they are and where they're useful.) Ciaran 14:48, 12 June 2009 (EDT)
How about putting say Statements from CEA-PME into a new Category:SME. This would also cover individual SMEs and other related articles, all in one place. (Statements from CEA-PME should also go into Category:European Union, Category:SME into Category:Organisations, and so on.) - steelpillow 06:29, 13 June 2009 (EDT)

Help requests

The idea of Category:Pages with please help section is duplicated by Template:Highlight box. But I think it worth keeping both, so that:

  • An editor who gets stuck can add the article to the category.
  • You can then cherry-pick the urgent/important ones to your highlight box.

I'd prefer to rename it as Category:Please help, and create a Template:Please help to go with it. A struggling editor would then add something like {{Please help|US FTC hearings}} to their article, which could both add the article to the category, and put up a suitable notice on the page. What do you think? - steelpillow 06:29, 13 June 2009 (EDT)

Just spotted your Template:Country-region-todo. Scope for more rationalisaton of the help requests? - steelpillow 06:43, 13 June 2009 (EDT)
Well, I created Template:Please help - you can see it in action here. Any good? Not sure about the colors. steelpillow 16:27, 13 June 2009 (EDT)
Yup. I think Template:Please help is good.
I'm not sure if there's any way to combine that template with Template:Highlight box. "Please help" is for specific sections of pages, so that people can jot down incoherent/incomplete things and add that box instead of abstaining completely. The Highlight box is just for the Main_Page so that visitors will be more likely to see the articles which are topical or which might have improved since their last visit.
As for Template:Country-region-todo, that's a rush job to address the problem that the vast majority of visitors are simply not contributing. I have to figure out why. Maybe it's that they don't know what to contribute, so I just quickly made that experimental template. Ciaran 15:09, 15 June 2009 (EDT)
OK. Would it be a good idea if they were all styled the same? Or do you prefer the more general one to be different from your specific lists? steelpillow 04:00, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Spam

Looks like ESP Wiki is getting noticed. How's that protection regime coming along?

Oh, and I drew a line in the sand so any recent spam you find should not go back further than this timestamp. steelpillow 18:01, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

I've asked that SpamBlacklist be installed. (When it's installed, it will appear on the list of installed extensions I waited until now because I was trying to see that pattern of the spammer. It's clearly automated, but I don't understand why it removes it's own spam when adding new spam. Anyways, the same urls are often used, so I hope this will suffice. If not, the simplest captcha will have to be added for non-registered users who add a URL. Ciaran 14:49, 22 June 2009 (EDT)
New line in the sand, see timestamp. The block on Trend Micro vs Barracuda, 2008‎ seems to have worked. How about blocking Talk:Main Page too? steelpillow 05:10, 26 June 2009 (EDT)
Updated line in sand. Seems no point in deleting these rubbish sub-pages until spam blocking is in place, they only get created gain. And blocking them might encourage the bot to hit on an important page - let's leave it its backdoor to play in. steelpillow 04:17, 29 June 2009 (EDT)
Updated line in sand. See here for list of (possibly) corrupt pages as at this timestamp. steelpillow 04:49, 7 July 2009 (EDT)

More spam

Ciaran, can you please protect the following pages? They are coming under persistent bot attack. steelpillow 04:14, 4 August 2009 (EDT)

Templates

I have gathered a kind of gallery of the existing templates here.

They are a mixed-looking bunch, and I wonder if you would mind me messing with the styling to provide a more integrated look? steelpillow 09:13, 28 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, I have done a bit of tidying. I think it might be good if Template:Country-region-todo, Template:Discuss-header and Template:Highlight box all shared the same "house" style. Would that be OK, and would you object if I try to improve on the gray-with-thick-borders style? steelpillow 06:10, 11 July 2009 (EDT)
That would make sense. Feel free to experiment, and thanks for this effort. Ciaran 19:29, 13 July 2009 (EDT)

Also, some of the broken and trivial ones are probably still genuine works in hand, while others could be deleted – but which? steelpillow 09:13, 28 June 2009 (EDT)

The five templates in the broken and trivial section are probably necessary. They look like they're part of the unfinished import of Wikipedia's Cite_web module. I'm not sure how to proceed with that, but it's probably best to leave those templates as-is for now. Ciaran 19:29, 13 July 2009 (EDT)

Proposal

Hi, if you have time, what do you think of this proposal for standardising notice box styles using templates? steelpillow 11:20, 29 July 2009 (EDT)

OK, I replied to your comments here. The best approach depends on how much complex code you are happy to maintain. steelpillow 06:24, 3 August 2009 (EDT)

The ParserFunctions extension is not installed, so programming dynamic templates, such as #if statements, are out for the time being. I'll have to stick to my old-fashioned template tree for now. steelpillow 10:41, 4 August 2009 (EDT)

I've requested that ParserFunctions be installed. Looks useful. Ciaran 15:53, 4 August 2009 (EDT)
Any idea how long that might take? steelpillow 13:47, 5 August 2009 (EDT)
It could be a week or more :-/ I've submitted quite a few sysadmin requests recently. Ciaran 07:18, 6 August 2009 (EDT)

Highlight box

The Template:Highlight box causes a problem because it contains two lists. Also, one list is informative while the other asks for help. I'd suggest implementing these as separately templated lists, invoked by the highlight box. That way:

  • The two lists can easily be styled differently, to inherit the site style for each kind of list.
  • Either list can be invoked independently on other pages, as required.
  • The highlight box can be easily modified to add/remove lists and other information boxes.
  • It removes a layer from my standard template tree.

I have put up a couple of alternative visuals here. What do you think? steelpillow 07:04, 7 August 2009 (EDT)

I think the first of the alternatives is the best. I've used it for Highlight_box now. Ciaran 07:36, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
Are you trying to get all three list boxes the same height? Text flow makes this difficult when users narrow the browser window - either bulleted text flows onto a new line, or the right hand end must run off the display (already this happens in very narrow windows). Stretching all boxes to the tallest one is the best approach. Unfortunately, CSS2 is not up to that, while browser support for CSS3 is still patchy. The only reliable way is to hard-style the boxes as table cells, ignoring the "house style" templates. Do you want to go back to that? steelpillow 07:46, 8 August 2009 (EDT)
I'd like the box to be as short as possible so the reader sees as much of the rest of the page as possible. The ideal is that no line should wrap while any other box has spare horizontal space, even if wrapping is bound to happen on some people's displays. I know it's a sin to use tables for layout, but I can't think of any other way right now. Whether all the boxes are the same height or not can be decided afterward based on how it looks, but I think the first thing to get right is the use of screen space. Having the box spill off the right side of the page should probably completely avoided. Ciaran 08:03, 8 August 2009 (EDT)

Template:Kept-protected

I just rewrote Template:Kept-protected to be a bit more informative, and to apologise for the inconvenience. Please revert if you don't like it.

Does it really benefit from the links and stuff added afterwards? I cannot see the point of them: all the other wiki functions are still there as usual, such as the navigation menu. steelpillow 12:31, 14 August 2009 (EDT)

If a human arrives at one of those pages, then they must be lost, so I stuck in the links menu to help them find their way to something interesting. If a spammer is adding links to a page and then including that link in their mesh of links (to game Google's pagerank system), then I'd prefer to pass that pagerank boost on to our good pages. I don't know if either is actually helpful in any way in the slighest, but I thought it wouldn't hurt. Ciaran 12:43, 14 August 2009 (EDT)
2nd reply: Actually, when it's used on Talk pages that might really be used by someone, the template:highlight_box isn't useful, so I've removed it now. Ciaran 17:18, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

Table of countries and regions

I have come up with a demo sortable table of countries/regions here. It doesn't compete with your inline list - it is bigger and with more features, so is more suited to being a page in its own right. What do you think? For example, is anything missing from the demo entries? One thing might be a yes/no/don't_know note of whether swpats are legal in that country? steelpillow 05:07, 13 August 2009 (EDT)

Updated: Countries and regions
I'm still trying to think of what other columns would be good. It's probably too ambitious to try to sum up the legality of swpats in a country in a table field (does the patent office grant them? Does the law allow them? Do courts uphold them? sometimes/always?) The "Related content" field is a good idea though.
BTW, I use a text editor that makes semi-automated updating easy (emacs), so updates to a 30-item or a 300-item table are no problem. Ciaran 05:32, 13 August 2009 (EDT)
Discussion on "Latin" vs "South" America moved here.

Category tree

I added a basic Category tree to Finding things on en.swpat.org. Hopefully we can now see what is going on and make sensible changes. Also, if you create a new category, just add it to the tree. If you could do your EMACS magic and change every [[:Category:This topic]] entry to [[:Category:This topic|This topic]], that would look better. steelpillow 14:19, 5 September 2009 (EDT)

Threats

Category:Threats is now empty, and is not linked to from anywhere (other than my tree). Should it be deleted, or do you have other plans for it? steelpillow 14:32, 5 September 2009 (EDT)

No, I can't think of anything we'd use it for. I'll delete it. Ciaran 08:52, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

The case for software patents

Groklaw recently started some serious discussion on the pros and cons of software patents, having got a law firm to write in favour of them. I added a link on the Groklaw page (anonymously - sorry). Might be worth following. steelpillow 16:03, 30 September 2009 (EDT)

I saw that and I'm looking forward to reading it. It was a great idea from PJ - our side really needs to understand that why the other side succeeds in convincing politicians. I've just finished working on the Bilski brief, so I've a day of press work to do and then I'm going to read the Groklaw discussion. Ciaran 02:34, 1 October 2009 (EDT)
You probably just saw Red Hat Files its Bilski Brief: Asks Supreme Ct. to Exclude Software From Patentability before I posted this, too. steelpillow 17:00, 1 October 2009 (EDT)
That, I hadn't seen. thanks :-) Ciaran 17:42, 1 October 2009 (EDT)

Several things

Hi, Please see my comments at:

Also, you might like to note the new Petition to stop software patents in Europe. If it hasn't already, it could make a news item at [news.swpat.org].

steelpillow 17:30, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

I've a few concerns about that petition. The main one is that it might have to be replaced in a few weeks/months time. With the Lisbon Treaty, the citizens of the EU can now force the European Commission to propose legislation on a topic by submitting a petition with one million signatures. The EuroLinux petition gathered 435,000 signatures, so a million isn't impossible. The requirements for evoking this procedure haven't been layed out yet. With the national focus and the generalness of the StopSoftwarePatents petition, it might not be usable as a starting point for a million-signature initiative. If we're going to have a new, very important petition in a few weeks/months, then supporting this petition now will have been a waste and will confuse people and make them tired of petitions.
The SSP petition has been gathering signatures since 2008, so I guess there's no particular urgency right now to publicise it, so I was planning on waiting to talk to FFII about this first. Other than the Glyn Moody blog entry and the link on gnu.org, is there anything new about this petition? Ciaran 04:40, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
Well, I didn't know all that. Should I remove the mention/links for it that I added in a couple of places? 83.104.46.71 13:57, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
The links you added are fine. Mild support is justified. I signed the petition back in 2008. As for doing outreach, I'd hold off until I see someone from FFII saying they think a push is a good move right now.
And all the other edits yesterday were great too. Ciaran 14:24, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Case law

How about a Category:Case law? we have Category:Case law by region, but most regions do not have their own Case Law category. steelpillow 17:22, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Interactive tables and navboxes

There is a feature on Wikipedia which allows things like tables and menu boxes which collapse to the heading line only, or tables which can be sorted on any column. It uses css/javascript classes, as for example in {| class="wikitable collapsible" ... |} . I'm not quite sure how it works, but I believe it involves:

I though it might be useful for streamlining the growing Category tree. Worth pursuing? steelpillow 10:54, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

I've installed this now:
Simple collapsible table
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
But I'm not sure if it's everything that you'd want for Category tree. It seems to just to a basic hiding table.
One feature that would be useful is a "show all" button - which would require that the whole tree is in one table. The reason is that, my way of using pages such as Category tree (and the front page) is that I search them with the Ctrl-f feature of my web browser. If things are collapsed, that won't work. Assuming my usage pattern is common enough to merit tolerance :-) this problem could be avoided if the reader could see within the first screenful that there are collapsed lists/table in the page. If the page was one big list, like Category tree, then doing this would be trivial. What I'm trying to describe is quite simple, but I'm using too many words, so I'll stop now and try to describe it more concisely later. Ciaran 15:57, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
It comes into its own when you start styling it on the site css and nesting tables:
Outer collapsible table
This table defaults to open
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
steelpillow 15:56, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
Hmm, I wonder if this could be used to turn the "welcome2" bar from the top of ACTA-6437-10.pdf as text into an unfurlable tree with most of e.s.o's articles. Ciaran 19:50, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
One issue with such nav bars is, are there any pages that it should not appear on? Maybe a decent navigation system on the Main Page is enough - it's only one click away, and is there really a need for a duplicate navigation menu? If you do want one, such collapsible menus are best done as a side menu (typically down the right hand side) to avoid disturbing the layout too much when bits are opened and closed. You can use tables as here, or if appropriate changes are made to (I think) the default javascript page, it can be done as "nav box" menus (which don't seem to be working at the moment). steelpillow 20:24, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
How's this: Template:navbox vertical? I've added it to Finding things on en.swpat.org. A few things remain, like giving some long links shorter link text, giving the entries a logical order, and I'll try to put another one or two boxes/draws/series in the box.
I'm not sure what would be a good policy for where to add it. Maybe putting it on every page isn't a bad idea? For now, I slap it on pages whenever I think that page is going to get an influx of visitors via another website - like when I mention a page in a comment on slashdot, etc. Ciaran 00:48, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Up to speed

Hi there Ciaran,

I'm trying to get up to speed on what is happening (or should be happening) in my part of the world (Québec) against software patents. I'll try to do that as I improve the Canada page. I need to catch up on some reading. It isn't yet quite clear in my mind where Canada stands on software patents in 2010.

Let me know if I can be of any other use. -- Mathieugp 13:44, 16 March 2010 (UTC)


Hey Mathieu!
Yeh, more info about Canada would be very useful. I've made a list of starting points at Talk:Canada#Todo.
(Lorsque j'ai lancé ce wiki j'ai utilisé le nom en.swpat.org parce que j'ai pensé que je serais prêt après quelques mois à lancer fr.swpat.org et es.swpat.org. Je me suis attendu à ce que le progrès de ce wiki soit plus vite. En réalité, le grandeur et la qualité avancent assez vite et j'y consacre beaucoup de temps pour le faire avancer mais le wiki n'a pas encore atteint la réputation nécessaire pour attirer de grande communauté. Bref, je prévois une version francophone. Ce n'est pas encore possible comme je suis tellement occupé avec cette version anglophone, mais je t'en parlerai avant de lancer la version francophone.)
Ciaran 18:14, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
D'accord. Quand elle sera plus étoffée, je ferai une version française de la page Canada dans User:Mathieugp/Drafts/Canada (fr). On pourra déplacer cette traduction dans fr.swpat.org par la suite. -- Mathieugp 21:26, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Wiki admin help

Ciaran: this is a worthy project. Nice.

I noticed your wiki configuration is on the minimalistic side. I just tried to clean up an inline reference with:

<ref>{{cite web|url=http://someplace.com}}</ref>

and got a huge mess of crud from Template:Cite web that appears to be a result of not having Extension:ParserFunctions installed.

I'm upgrading my personal MediaWiki today from 1.11 to 1.16 alpha (on a trial basis, on a Ubuntu server) so I'm exactly sure what 1.15 needs to run well, but you would likely be well served to have more extensions available. Lately on my own wiki I'm activating some semantic wiki features, but these are a heavy burden for a public wiki. Blows me away what you can do with Extension:DynamicPageList, but it's really easy to misuse and abuse. To put this on a public wiki, it would need to be carefully locked down.

Some that you might want to consider:

I don't run all this stuff on my public MW instances, so I can't personally vouch for security, but these are pretty mainstream. Bearing that limitation on my skillset in mind, I'm happy to help out with wiki configuration if you drop a note on my talk page, or maybe better, use the mail function to ping my attention. — MaxEnt 21:08, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Glad you like it. It's taken 13 months of pretty solid work to get it from zero to this point. I think it's now at the point where some more exposure could spark off a contributor community. If you could give it any mentions, that would be useful.
Thanks for the extensions tips. CategoryTree and VariablesExtension certainly look worthwhile. I've requested ParserFunctions already and hope it will get installed soon. My current plans are to stay away from semantic features, for now at least. The tech side of me sees the benefits, but I want to keep contributing simple, at least as simple as contributing to Wikipedia. But if you're looking for an example, http://groups.fsf.org is using some semantic stuff. Ciaran 21:49, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
I hadn't looked at your user page when I wrote my comment, but I see you have a fair technical base of your own. I've helping out on another wiki where the admin was flying somewhat blind. It's a lot of work to get a wiki off the ground. I generated 5000 pages of content in my own wiki before poking my nose into semantic features. Can't exploit semantics without data. I have a personal saying: simplicity is a social construct. If your content becomes technical enough, you'll want to push more mechanism behind the curtain.
I've been devouring content lately at EconTalk precisely to better understand the accepted terms of debate Boldrin on Intellectual Property makes some good economic arguments against patents. Cool, your wiki already has Against Intellectual Monopoly by the same author. I think I'll dump that link there right now. [done] And a mini-screed on my user page.
Thanks for pointing out the fsf wiki. They have an extension there I would like to run myself.
You'll note I boldly added a template convention and another book article. Suggested presentation, for your consideration.
Finally, I see you do a lot of editing. If you use FireFox, take a look at the MakeLink add-on. I couldn't live without for transcribing external resources. MaxEnt 01:58, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

In the news

Talking of exposure, Linux Today have run this news item on your ACTA scoop. steelpillow 22:39, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Cool. Hopefully the new navbox will increase the number of visitors seeing our other pages.
The Tridgell transcript got good coverage too (Slashdot, LinuxToday, OSNews). I'm going to do more focussing on news, interviews, and news.swpat.org as a way to attract people to en.swpat.org. 04:33, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Feedback to US gov

If you have time Ciaran, check this: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110209/12240913029/white-house-wants-advice-whats-blocking-american-innovation.shtml . This website is a great resource you could mention. You only need to fill in the email and comment sections of the feedback form. Jose X 20:41, 9 February 2011 (EST)

OMG. What software patents?

Hi, long time no see. I'm afraid I have been soo busy elsewhere, but I had to pass this on to you.

It's not often that Pamela Jones, celebrated driving force of Groklaw, begins a news item with "OMG."

The U.S. Federal Circuit, a bench of ten judges, has just shot software patents ragged. Being a legal ruling, just how ragged is no doubt shrouded in lawyer's fees.

For more, see: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130510155818152

Cheers, steelpillow 14:18, 11 May 2013 (EDT)

Hey! Good to hear from you. I've been holding down the fort in your absence :-)
I'm just running out the door but I'll get a quick page set up about the ruling.
And (in probably smaller news) there's the German parliament discussing software patents, and the NZ legislature publishing (wobbly) anti-swpat legislation. All this as I'm heading into exam time. Ciaran 15:27, 11 May 2013 (EDT)

Conference EP 4-5 September 2014

Conference on innovation in the EP 4-5 September 2014: http://www.epip.eu/conferences/epip09/docs/programme.pdf

Thanks. But I unfortunately can't make it those days. If there are other events in the future I'd be happy to hear of them. If I can go, I'll write a blog post to summarise. Ciaran (talk) 10:35, 3 September 2014 (EDT)
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