Furious w.r.t. the Software Patent handling of the EC

Clearly we are all getting endangered by this. It also show how little consideration we get from the European Commision. I wrote emails to EU elected representatives, people I voted for, never got an answeri even automated :-(. I used to be enthusiatic about the european construction, in practice I'm afraid it allows just politicians to dilute their responsabilities, and then they are in heaven to take advantage of their position without being at risk legally. I think I will end-up voting against the European constitution here, and really really I would not have expected this a few months ago.

In the list of industrial "partners" who can now forget getting direct help from me about libxml2 or other open source projects, there is a nice list at EICTA:

07/03/2005: EICTA welcomed today's decision by the EU Competitiveness Council to adopt a Common Position
on the proposed Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions.

This list some of our "friends" like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Alcatel, Bull, Apple, Cisco, Canon, Dell, HP, Fujitsu, Motorola, Nec, Phillips, SAP, Siemens, Thomson, Toshiba. I'm in a positively furious mood at the moment and looking for possible retaliation (yes I'm really unhappy). So what can I do to express my miscontentment, and tell those "allies" that I would like them to play by the rule. One of the thing I can do is send them a nice mail each time that anyone from those companies asks for help about some of my code, telling them that I can only afford to give help in the framework of a legally binding contract with my corporate employeer. Anyway I doubt an isolated action is likely to help anybody, only concerted wide scale and clearly directed action might help. What would be the effect if 80% of the open-source projects maintainers would just refuse to help those company outside of a paying contract.

Anyway I don't expect a large scale revolt agaisnt this though I would like to be surprised, I think I will just set-up a web page on veillard.com explaining why I won't give free support anymore to some companies, and just use that as a canonical answer to mail coming from them. This won't block people from asking from a personal email for example if they wish.