http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html

 

Are they actually suggesting to get rid of open source?

 

What about companies like Novell or IBM? Wouldn't the bill be specifically designed to remove these companies from France? This truly amazes me. How can anybody be so stupid?

 

And wouldn't this be unenforceable? Frech developers could just distribute their software on servers outside of France.

Well they are French, so I guess it can't be helped.

What is the motive behind banning free software?? If a company wants to publish free software, shouldn't that be up to the company to take a hit? I think the government is overstepping it's bounds a lot.

I think I would like to see a few more details. This looks like a bit of a red herring. I doubt the constitution of France would permit that sort of general restriction

Indeed. From the few details that I can get from that article, it looks like they're banning free P2P software, but the article doesn't make anything clear.

tangently related

The bill is designed to stop people from writting software like p2p. It will allows companies (I guess SNEP and SCPP) to sue the developers of their software, ie, they'd have to charge people to use it. They think that if other people cant get the source then the problem wouldn't be as bad.

 

For instance if somebody took firefox and gave it a built in whatever, the developers of firefox (in France) would be sued, along with whoever modified it. And possible anybody hosting a server in france with it. France doesn't have a very big juristiction though.