Hey Europe: Say No to Software Patents

The U.S. has already converted to the dark side of software patents. Soon, it will be Europe’s turn to decide whether to allow this silly practice pending a vote on the issue next month.

I have always thought that software patents are absurd and taken as a whole, very counterproductive to the software industry. A quick example: European Patent Office has issued a patent for the progress bar, which is a UI gimmick that can show the progress of a task such as the size of a file being downloaded. With the patent, now whoever writes a program with a progress bar element can get sued by the patent holder.

To rally Europeans against this silly vote, Richard Stallman of Free Software Foundation fame has written a really nice piece called “Patent absurdity”, which I urge all of you to read.

For Switchers: migrate from Outlook Express to Apple Mail via Thunderbird

So biker got his papa a spanking new Apple Powerbook. Biker papa’s been a Windows users for years, his last laptop being an IBM Thinkpad X30 running Windows XP. Biker papa’s most heavily used app in Windows XP is of course Outlook Express 6 (OLE6). To help papa for the email transition, biker found an easy way to migrate papa’s email and address book from OLE6 to Apple Mail 2.0: use Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client as an intermediary.