Richard Stallman, Tim O’Reilly, Alan Cox, Rasmus Lerdorf and Monty Widenius endorse Florian Müller’s candidacy in the “European of the Year 2005″ internet poll.

I had the pleasure to interact with Tim, Alan and Rasmus on EuroOSCON in Amsterdam this week, and they all considered voting for Florian’s to be an important way to increase the political weight of the concerns towards SWPATs.

The press release on NoSoftwarePatents.com cites as a reason that Florian “runs on a NoSoftwarePatents ticket, and that is the message we want to reinforce”:

In a NoSoftwarePatents press release, the community leaders today expressed their support for the voting recommendations that NoSoftwarePatents.com has published in more than a dozen languages: http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/ev50/vote.html. Participants in the poll are required to make a choice in each of ten categories, and the voting list provided by NoSoftwarePatents.com explains the role that various candidates played in the software patent debate so that voters can reward the opponents of software patents and penalize pro-patent politicians.

Mueller’s endorsers pointed out that the FOSS community has played a particularly active role in the fight against software patents, but that software patents “threaten us all because they don’t discriminate based on programming language, operating system, or licensing model”. The group is “disconcerted by early reports” that the EU is now looking at alternative ways of giving software patents a stronger legal basis in Europe, such as an EU community patent regulation.

The endorsement furthermore stated: “Some other nominees also stand for valid concerns and noble causes. However, those issues and individuals have already received a lot of coverage in the mass media, while the implications of software patents to the whole world, including developing countries, still require much more public awareness. In the sense that software patents monopolize mental steps, they are also a human rights issue.”

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