Re: Patent policy announcement: please review and translate
Filipus Klutiero wrote:
>> <p>Debian Project Leader, Stefano Zacchiroli said<q>The Debian Project has a
>> long tradition of standing up for users' rights to an entirely Free operating
>> system. Patent fears, uncertainties and doubts undermine this. A patent policy
>> and a contact point for related issues in the Debian archive will help reducing
>> patent FUD among our users.</q></p>
>
> There should be no comma between "Debian Project Leader" and "Stefano".
Fixed.
> I for one find the first quoted sentence strange. It seems to imply
> patents breach our rights to an entirely Free operating system. I
> guess patents do make it harder to produce a quality, Free and
> law-abiding operating system, and probably also limits the quality any
> Free and legally usable OS can reach, but they would hardly prevent
> one from having a free OS.
Almost any given piece of software can be rendered unsafe to
distribute by a sufficiently crazy patent award, so it makes sense to
me. I'm more worried about "Patent fears, uncertainties and doubts
undermine this". Okay, it's part of a quote, so we should try to
avoid changing it; and it's expanding the acronym "FUD" in the next
sentence. But I'm not sure it's immediately obvious that that's what
it's doing - and besides, FUD was mentioned in an earlier paragraph.
What does "<acronym title="fear, uncertainty, and
doubt">FUD</acronym>" convert into as HTML and text versions?
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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