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What Does the EFF Even Do These Days?
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
OVER the years we wrote many articles about the EFF. In recent years our articles were mostly critical because there seems to be a coup, staged by people who don't truly care for the EFF's values and original mission. Suddenly the EFF is acting hostile towards the FSF/Richard Stallman and Wikileaks/Julian Assange, despite an historically amicable relationship. So what is going on? And why does the EFF act so soft on Microsoft? What does the EFF work for? Who does it raise money from? (The big sponsors, not individual members)
"As far as patent reform is concerned, the EFF has been severely weakened."This seems like a pattern that we saw before in the OSI, the Linux Foundation, and several other organisations. They register for special status with the IRS and then pay astronomically wages to people who serve monopolies instead of the organisations they claim to serve. The watchdogs fall asleep.
The video above shows that the EFF says almost nothing about EPO and about European software patents. It has not mentioned software patents in Europe or the EPO since about a decade ago. It covered the subject mostly 17.5 years ago in relation to the EU. To make matters worse, today's EFF hardly says anything about patents at all. It has said nothing about patents since last month and we could find only one post (blog post) about it in the past 50 days; no press release on patents since last year (December)!
The EFF used to write about patents almost every day and staff that used to deal with the issue no longer seems to be employed by the EFF, except perhaps one person. As far as patent reform is concerned, the EFF has been severely weakened. Common wisdom says, "follow the money..." ⬆