Munich’s Linux migration was held up by PR stunt

Generally, not all PR stunts are a bad thing. But when you try to do one with a poor mindset and a negative theme, I don’t think that anyone comes out the winner.

Software patent campaigner Florian Mueller revealed this week that the City of Munich’s decision to stall its Linux migration was the result of a PR stunt by anti-patent campaigners.

In his book, No Lobbyists As Such, which was published on Tuesday, Mueller tells the story of how anti-patent campaigners successfully fought against the software patent directive, which was eventually rejected by the European parliament in July 2005.

Anti-patent campaigners initially struggled to attract much press attention around the software patent directive, so decided to take drastic action, according to Mueller.

He claims: “If the media hadn’t reported much on what had happened so far with respect to software patents, then we had to make something happen that they would report on. We had to provoke a real crisis. Right away.”

Mueller, along with a few others, came up with the idea of the Green Party drafting written questions to the mayor of Munich, to ask about software patents and their impact on the Munich’s Linux migration project, known as LiMux.

Mueller helped the Green Party draft the questions, which were then put to the mayor of Munich at the end of July. A few days later, Mueller was made aware of an email sent to the LiMux project mailing list by Wilhelm Hoegner, the head of the data processing office at the City of Munich. This email said that due to the questions tabled by the Green party the project had been put on ice. Source: Silicon.com

[tags]munich,patent directive,green party,anti-patent campaigners,limux[/tags]