[Arm-netbook] pyra computer

[Jean Flamelle]

It is also important to note that for all intensive an diy project
could receive a certification.

Also if you read the first line of that wikipedia article:

"Reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms, also known as fair,
reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, denote a voluntary
licensing commitment that standards organizations often request from
the owner of an intellectual property right (usually a patent) that
is, or may become, essential to practice a technical standard."

Reading between the lines, the point of the "intellectual property" is
that it is the leverage has over companies. Without patents EOMA is
only a word and EOMA has no legal authority to stop imitators from
just using a slightly different word. With a patent however, a
standards organization can legally issue a cease-and-desist order.

So this brings up the tough question of how can the EOMA standard
exert any authority without patents?

Also what will motivate companies to hire Luke as a consultant? That's
important too, am I wrong?

Community support through donations wins Luke a certain degree of
independence, so Luke won't have to charge many people consultation
fees and can give advice more-solely based on merit. Here's an
interesting question though: what motivates people to donate and will
that scale as more companies gain interest causing Luke to inevitably
need to train people to act as consultants on behalf of the EOMA
project? My hope is, yes.

One way to have leverage is for EOMA to become so popular, companies
without the mark are actively avoided by a significant fraction of the
population in given places. This is not to be underestimated, because
food certifications have demonstrated a lot of success with this
strategy.

However we should also consider:
The patent system isn't necessarily broken, if we consider the rampant
abuse to be the result of scammers. We could see copyleft "public
commons" patents which are licensed openly to the public so long as
certain rules pertaining to certain morals are followed. Like with GPL
violations, any member of the public should be able to make a lawsuit
against a violator of these rules.

With that possibility in mind, abuse could get worse with copyleft
principles, because rules could be stupid or misguided. FRAND already
comes into play with that, so there is already an appeals mechanism in
place against abusive copyleft or open patent licenses (if I
understand correctly). Perhaps patent courts could expand to judge as
fair or unfair the rules of an open patent license. Then such
standards organizations could form around protecting people and
certain morals, by prosecuting violators of these open patents.
Ultimately this could easily turn into an extortion racket with people
living off of legal and consultation fees. Such an organization should
live solely on donations and only conduct legal cases pro-bono.

This is were things get weird.

Aren't you asking, "wait if you just implied we should consider living
off of consultation and legal fees immoral extortion, why are you
defending patents as a form of leverage used by companies who would be
able to do that extortion.. you look like you're contradicting
yourself up and down"?

Well, the fact remains the public benefits if the public shares the
morals being protected. Legal cases write lots of documentation which
the public might like to read, if well written. The more injustice an
organization fights this way then the more journalism they have
necessarily done and the more journalistic documents they can easily
publish.
This engineers a service that gratifies donors and will immediately
stop if the donations also stop, motivating people not to be selfish.

EOMA standards organizations can also thoroughly document (through
transcripts, or audio or video journalism) what they were consulted
about and the advice given, so that it becomes easily apparent if they
were warning a company that they were consulting for about potential
violations or if they instead ever used consultation fees as a mode of
extortion.

This mailing list shows EOMA off to a great start in terms open-ness
and thorough journalistic documentation of everything going on. I
fully support Luke and this project, and this is why I again draw
connections between this project and the baby giant company Cloud
Imperium Games, for their record-breakingly thorough self-journalism.

I know they aren't FLOSS, but we need to be like them.