LONG before we covered the EPO in depth we had published a lot of articles about software patents in Europe. One of our most powerful voices was Pieter Hintjens, who sometimes even contributed. Pieter died yesterday. It was a sad day for many including yours truly and we are still thinking about him. Many people only discovered him after his death or while he was in his deathbed.
During the software patents "war", Wildeboer said, Hintjens did this, pointing to the image above. Georg Greve, the guy behind the FSFE, said the same thing.
"I have a big box of papers from the swpat directive at my parents' place," Benjamin Henrion responded. "There should be one on there. And SSP [Stop Software Patents] tshirts as well." He later added a link to the original PDF (of the above, we've made a local copy).
What a great example of the clever humour of Hintjens! He did many other stunts like this.
"Before slashdot era," Henrion recalls, "there was segfault. Pieter wrote an article in 1998 predicting that Microsoft was patent tax FOSS #visionary" (and he was right!).
So rest in piece, online friend. We shall carry on fighting against abstract patents on algorithms. ⬆
Photo credit: Hintjens "really liked this photo," says Adam Flaherty. Photo by Tim Lossen.
