Tectonic - a local Free and Open Source magazine reports that a group of concerned software engineers have sent a request to Microsoft's South African patent attorneys to voluntarily give up their software patent which covers "Word processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML". Read more.

Ed: The patent attorneys are the same ones who thought that the laugh it off case was no laughing matter. Fortunately the Constitutional Court disagreed and freedom of speech was protected.

For those readers who do not understand the implications of this there are a number of issues at stake:

• Firstly, you cannot patent software in South Africa, but clearly this has happened.
• The same patent was rejected in the US.
• The method outlined has been implemented in Free Software for a long time in both OpenOffice.org and Abiword.
• This patent directly affects OpenOffice.org and the OASIS OpenDocument format that both use XML for the content of the wordprocessed document. Through Translate.org.za's local language program OpenOffice.org became the first wordprocessor to be offered in South African languages. In various trade articles OpenOffice.org has consitently beaten or stood shoulder to shoulder with Microsoft's Office product. A patent seems like a nice way to stop such competition.
• Software patents are bad for small software business - no matter what retoric you hear from the large corporates and their attorneys. The numbers speak for themselves: in South African less than 200 patents of over 150,000 are held by local companies the rest are held by foreign nationals (Ed: Sorry can't find the correct reference). So this is a system that helps protect local inovation? I think not.

Translate.org.za stands firmly behind the efforts of Bob Jollife and the Linux Professionals Association in their efforts to get this patent overturned and to return a measure of fair and sane competition to the South African software arena.

How can you help? Lend your support to the efforts of those fighting this. Make sure your governmnet representatives are aware of the implications to Free low cost software and the empowering of South Africa as a software giant. In Europe it has already been demonstrated that software multinationals will not stop at anything to railroad software patent legislation through the law making systems. We have to try our best to make sure it doesn't happen here. Its your choice, enjoy a world of rich innovative products or consume more of the same old same old.