Summary: It's crystal clear that trying to appease everyone, all the time, is impossible; in the case of the EPO, for example, we hope that exposing Team Battistelli/Campinos helps raise awareness of the harms of patent maximalism, and when speaking about Free software -- whilst occasionally bashing the alternatives (proprietary) -- we hope to convince more people to join the "Good Fight"

THE extended weekend (American holiday) is nearly over and we still have two ongoing series, one of which resumes tomorrow. It's about GitHub, which has just had hours-long downtime. Sometimes those things are indicative of brain drain, but not always. Things are everything but rosy deep inside GitHub (Microsoft does not want the public to see it).

Here in Techrights we have made allies of convenience and shared interests. Some of our writers/contributors work or worked for Microsoft; sometimes they remain anonymous. We've been more or less the same for 15 years. It's simple. Stick to a position, defend it as long as it is defensible, and hope that some people will see the light and maybe 'defect' (like choosing to leave Microsoft, then speak out against Microsoft; it does happen sometimes!). We've never attempted to lower our guard by appeasing patent maximalists, who are also the system's profiteers. During this pandemic many people realise what impact patents really have on health, whether it's because a few companies stockpiled patents on work funded by taxpayers or more people recognise that COVID-19 patent monopolies greatly increase the cost of vaccines (sometimes by a factor of 100!) and reduce the incentive to improve existing vaccines. Heck, they even reduce the incentive to actually resolve this crisis because the longer it goes on for, the more doses will be sold (or rather, the more times those same patents will get "licensed").

We have a great deal to say and a lot of thoughts about patents, including OIN's war on our cause (abolishing software patents), Team UPC faking a lot of things (details in Daily Links), quality of European Patents collapsing (but law firms no longer speaking about it; nor do they speak about the EPO's tribunals lacking autonomy), and illegal "online" appeals still being compulsory (for another 6 months at least). On top of that we have FUD campaigns against GNU/Linux, which seem to have taken up a lot of time (rebuttals), so there's no lack of topics to cover, just a lack of time/capacity to cover them. We'll do our best to prioritise whilst also improving the site's operations, e.g. for better efficiency and broader protocol support. At the moment the Gemini capsule will almost never be more than 5 minutes behind the Web site. That's a considerable improvement in its own right. ⬆