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BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Thursday, January 17, 2008FFII President Pieter Hintjens Has Stepped Down. Livre  reports that after two years in office, Mr Pieter Hintjens earlier this month has decided to step down as FFII President. Apparently there have been severe differences between Mr Hintjens and other members of the board. Mr Hintjens is a software designer, writer, and campaigner with over 25 years' experience in the IT business. Founder and director of iMatix Corporation, he was the main author of the AMQP/0.8 industry standard messaging protocol, and main designer of the OpenAMQ messaging system. He had been elected at the FFII General Assembly on November 29, 2005, as successor of the founder of FFII, Mr Hartmut Pilch.Under its President Mr Pieter Hintjens the FFII was more eager than under his predecessor Mr Hartmut Pilch not only to serve the interests of the moralist subgroup within the crowd of the FFII followers. It strongly appeared as if FFII wanted to gain political influence by acquiring a  more pragmatic appeal. For example, Mr Hintjens fostered a co-operation with IBM officials with regard to some aspects of patent politics. According to the report cited above, FFII Vice-President Mr Barrionuevo (Spain) follows Mr Hintjens as FFII President.Mr. Barrionuevo is the CEO of OPENTIA, an I.T. company located in Madrid, and VIRTUA, an OPENTIA R&D branch located in the Technological Park of Andalusia (Spain). It is also reported that he is well known as an activist of electronic civil rights - being also coordinator of the project EstandaresAbiertos.org as well as a member of OpenDocument Fellowship, ODF Alliance and the Advisory Council of Hispalinux. Obviously there appears to be something like a rift between different groups concerning the future composition of the board. This note says that not only Mr Pieter Hintjens but also Mr Ivan Villanueva has stepped down. Maybe that Ms Laura Creighton, Founder of Sekans, a Swedish Venture Capital Firm, and Mr Rene Pfeiffer from Austria will join the FFII board.FFII had their heyday during the public debate on the EU Draft Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions when they managed to turn the table in the plenary vote of the European Parliament after the first reading of that matter. If they were allowed to get away with the result of the first reading, patent law in Europe would have been crippled. However, eventually the entire project was canceled by a vast majority of MEPs in the second reading of that bill in the European Parliament. Hence, Europe did not get a harmonisation directive unifying handling of patent applications relating to computer-implemented inventions, on the one hand, but Europe did not suffer any degradation of substantive patent law, on the other hand. Altogether it has been a wise choice to sacrifice the Draft Directive in return for maintaining the sound condition of the established body of patent law throughout Europe.During Mr. Hintjens' term in office, FFII was mainly active with regard to the Microsoft OOXML standardisation matter. It will be interesting to see if there will be any changes to the general orientation of FFII campaigning in the near future.[UPDATE 2008-01-20] FFII have eventually confirmed the new composition of the board.[UPDATE 2008-01-22] FFII appears to be split in agony over the Presidency of Mr Barrionuevo. Some RSS feed from www.ffii.org today unveiled a notice on a boad Wiki which is (at least currently) readable by the public, showing that Mr Pilch vigorously criticises Mr Barrionuevo, demanding that presidency should be taken over by the 1st vice president, Ms Laura Creighton.Technorati Tags:  Patents
Slow news day, this is old news. And to the surprise of externals it is not bad news. Pieter Hintjens now focussed on other projects that are closely tied to the patent reform mission. FFII never really did care about presidential roles. We were waiting and waiting for you to carry the story... Axel, btw. don't you read the council database anymore...
Did I miss anything like a FFII press release or something like that announcing the change at the helm? My impression is that this matter was treated quite secretive. Such doing might be considered unusual for any NGO with a public visibility like that of FFII.
I meant the EU-EPLA questions tabled by an Italian libertarian MEP. Normally we enjoy to read your blog as you carry all the goodness. The reason for a press delay is some uncertainty regarding reserve board members. The board hasn't taken a decision yet. Normally a press release covers issues relevant to the average joe in software programming. You also find the change announced in Dutch news. As you can see on http://www.digitalmajority.org/ Mr. Hintjens is well and alive.
Axel, Thank you for reporting this story. Indeed, I have stepped down as president of the FFII, and Alberto Barrionuevo is now acting president. The association is not yet ready to make a formal statement but I expect this will happen in due course. The FFII has grown rapidly over the last years, with new groups in many countries, and my views on how to organize this growth were different from those of enough of the members that I felt it was time for others to take over the work. Strong personalities do not always make the best consensus builders. I remain a committed member of the FFII and an ardent critic of the protectionist aspects of the patent system, and especially of software patents, which in my view are nothing less than a poison to the software industry. Thank you for your blog, which has over the years been a valuable source of reliable information.
Press releases about changes of President/Board/Statutes/Coffee machine have always look pretentious to me. Post a Comment
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