EU patents: can someone give me the gist?

[sandboy6184]

I just came to this site http://webshop.ffii.org/ and its listing some patents, i dont know if this is a joke or not? some guy from adobe patenting tabbed buttons, what the heck?

Whats all this craze that I see linux people talking about.

[chris78]

In fact its very simple. If nothing happens in the EU (the position of the council and parliament dont change) you will soon have a linux distribution without support for most of these features:

mp3
video (any! playback,editing etc.)
proprietary formats like (doc,excel etc.)
gif/jpeg (gif was allready taken out of gimp because of a patent!)
GUI components (progress bars, some kinds of buttons, editing help and many others)
and the list goes on....


If you dont want to or cant help then at least go here and sign these petitions:
http://www.noepatents.org/index_html?LANG=en
http://swpat.ffii.org/papri/europarl0309/cpedu/index.en.html (you need to make a basic registration in order to sign the "call for action" so that there are no faked or double signs)

If you can spend a little time, join the FFII here: http://www.ffii.org/ffii-cgi/aktiv?f=euparl&l=en
and find out how to help http://shell.franken.de/~dg1nsw/board/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=105

GNU/linux needs action now!

Chris