[Australia-public-discuss] Lobbying greens support.

[Shayne O'Neill]

Hi guys, new to this list, cant find archives so I apologise if I'm 
reitterating over any previous ground.

I'm old friends with Scott Ludlum of the Greens, whos been doing , in my 
slightly biased opinion, a somewhat heroic job leading the charge against the 
net filter in the senate estimates committee. He's reasonably competent on tech 
issues for a non techy type, and might well be interested in taking up the 
charge against the software patents proposals.

What would be really good to see is some sort of dossier on the issue, 
particularly on how it affects small australian business and innovation, but 
also how it affects the free & open source community and perhaps for that 
greens touch, green computing.

I'm not really up to date enough on this to fully prepare it myself, so is 
there anyone who would be interested in putting their hands up for this.

Things to keep in mind about the greens:
1) The greens are not really socialists, but they certainly are not freemarket 
libertarians. Free market arguments will not necessarily win the argument with 
them, but arguments about *small* business, and workers in bigger businesses, 
will. 
2) The greens are naturally attracted to the open and free source software 
movements. Free software embodies a lot of the arguments about community/DIY 
organising that the greens feel should be central to their vision of a 'better' 
future. 
3) The greens are *very* attracted to arguments about sustainability and 
diversity. A possible example of this sort of argument might be around 
compression algorithms. Compression saves energy by minimizing entropy and less 
abstractly communication infrastructure energy use and expenditure. Algorithms 
such as  g729 are excluded from free software and small business written 
software because of the outrageous costs to licence. The end result is most 
free software voip uses either G711, a bandwidth hungry broadband codec, or 
iLBC a processor hungry codec. Neither of which really qualify as suitable 
'green' algorithms.
4) Exposure to predatory american patent trolls. This can be a small business 
killer, especially in low-return and garage industries like iPhone development 
where a single lawsuit could effectively kill the operation before it even hit 
court.

It might also be worth noting the european situation, and moves to rethink the 
patent laws in the US.

If anyone wants to help put this together, I can get it to scott and maybe 
discuss it with him over beers. 

From there he might be able to talk to other greens senators to get it made 
into a platform for the party.

These are largely different arguments to win the libs over. For them the 
important factor will be protest from software design houses (I intend to talk 
to my local guy at some point about how the g729 codec affects my business) , 
and although I'm by default a labor voter, I'm far too angry with conroys utter 
technological illiteracy, and arrogance, to be unable to think up a rational 
approach to him.

Regards,

Shayne.

===================================
Shayne O'Neill Development
Mobile, Web and Business process integration.
address@hidden