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Alan Cox

Published: 31 Jan 2006 16:45 GMT

...being threatened with multi-million pound fines by the EU and on the other hand they're being offered software patents — Microsoft is one of the big influencers of this issue.

It is worrying that they're back on the agenda. It's a sign of more fundamental problems in the EU. The democratic process [of the European Parliament] is being devolved [to the unelected European Commission]. It's what people call policy laundering — 'it's a good idea, but we'll never get it past the electorate, so let's slip it through and then pass it on to the individual governments.'

If that's the case, what can people do to campaign against software patents?
The first thing is to write to MEPs. Its not even necessarily about content — it's about demonstrating the sheer number of people that care about this issue. What we did last time wasn't about the fineness of letters — the FFII got 300,000 signatures. The Commission can ignore this but parliament has to get re-elected. It will be very hard though. The fact that there are almost no lobbying laws in the EU is a very big problem — in other places lobbyists are accountable

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has launched a patent library, to aggregate information on patents that have been pledged to the open source community. How important do you think such initiatives will be?
That work is going to be very important, but at end of the day software should not be patentable. There is a challenging area where you have hardware and software together, but it is the hardware bit that should be patentable.

A number of technology companies including IBM and Microsoft have called for the reform of the US patent system. How much hope does this give you?
Things are slowly turning the right direction, but it's really only baby steps. Companies are being forced to admit that maybe there is a problem, but no-one's said how to fix it.

Onto other topics, as a long-time Linux kernel developer, what changes have you seen in the kernel development process over recent years as the operating system has become more commercialised?
Well, there are more patches posted Monday to Friday, rather than weekends. But, the biggest change has not been commercialisation — it's been quality. In the early days people were building Linux. It now does everything it's required to do, so all the changes are about faster, cleaner and better ways of doing things. Nowadays, someone will say, 'how do I get it to run two percent faster' or add a new device.

It's the sum of things that all users want from it, which is really good. If you had said in the start that you wanted an operating system that runs on mainframes, PCs and palm pilots, people would have said that wasn't possible. Now, every time we get change that breaks something, we have a cycle of making things work for all platforms.

The kernel is very modular, so one area rarely affects another. But it does get harder to improve Linux as it gets better. Wikipedia will face...

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Its the applications and device drivers that run on windows that cement its dominance. How many people would fork out hundreds of pounds for Vista if Linux ran all the software and kit they wanted to use.