ESP Wiki:About

Welcome to ESP Wiki! ESP Wiki was launched in February 2009 by End Software Patents as the main global source for campaigning against software patents. After a period of inactivity, it was relaunched in September 2021. Ciarán O'Riordan was the main admin and core contributor of the wiki. Panos Alevropoulos is the current admin.

Here you will find information related to ESP Wiki. Starting in September 2021, major changes will be documented here in an irregular fashion. You can also consult our roadmap, which is a brief list of ideas we are willing to implement to ESP Wiki in the future.

Note that this page concerns solely ESP Wiki. For more information on ESP, check our dedicated entry. For updates related to ESP in general, check our blog.

Content policies

ESP Wiki shares the same content policies as Wikipedia, except for one: its neutral point of view. As a campaign to change the law, published content must adhere to both a political tone and an academic verifiability.

Against software patents

Entries are written for the purpose of raising awareness of the injustice that software patents impose on society. Opinions to the contrary are allowed to be published as long as they are accompanied by corresponding criticism.

Verifiability

Material challenged or likely to be challenged, and all quotations, must be attributed to a reliable, published source. Verifiability means that people reading and editing ESP Wiki can check that information comes from a reliable source.

No original research

Entries may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position not clearly advanced by the sources.

Discrete position allowed

As an exception, entries may feature a separate section that criticizes an aforementioned opinion. This exception is derived from the first content policy.

Roadmap

Completed items are moved to project updates.

• Create an interactive map showing the state of software patents worldwide.
• Form a robust community that is divided into distinct teams for contributing and monitoring information on the wiki.
• Update the content of core wiki pages, using reliable sources and the wiki's style guide.
• Catalog major software patents using MediaWiki forms.
• Allow multiple languages; pages in languages other than English will have to be reorganized.

Project updates

For updates older than 2021, visit this page. We encourage and welcome feedback and ideas on how we can make ESP Wiki even better at our general discussion page.

August 2023

• End Software Patents submitted feedback to the European Commission's proposal for a Regulation on standard-essential patents (SEPs). See ESP's submitted letter.

April 2023

• End Software Patents participated at the Free Software Foundation Europe's Legal & Licensing Workshop 2023 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Panos Alevropoulos and Ciarán O'Riordan presented an updated version of the FOSDEM 2023 talk, with an emphasis on how the regulation will work (based on new information) and how it can be improved.

February 2023

• End Software Patents participated at FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels, Belgium. Panos Alevropoulos and Ciarán O'Riordan presented the upcoming standard-essential patents Regulation in the European Union, with an emphasis on what we should expect (based on European case law) and how we could make it work for free software.

January 2023

• FOSS United approached us to discuss recent developments regarding software patents in India (summary of the call ).

March 2022

• End Software Patents participated at LibrePlanet 2022 with a talk by Panos Alevropoulos entitled "The state of software patents in 2022" (transcript).
• Added content policies.
• Added a style guide.
• Created an ESP community on Lemmy, a libre link aggregator. ESP Wiki news will also be posted there from now on.
• Amended several templates, based on a new House Style warnbox.
• Created custom citation schemes.

September 2021

• The campaign was successfully revamped thanks to the coordinated efforts of the Free Software Foundation's campaigns, licensing and tech teams together with Panos Alevropoulos.
• The wiki was completely redesigned with a new logo, theme, icons, and domain name.
• All wiki content is now categorized in four top level categories: General introduction, Campaign material, Opinions, and Legal information.
• The main page now has a simple interface with intuitive icons.
• Many technical changes under the hood that assure a modern web experience.