Greens urge end to software patents

Sounds like a great plan from the greens, but how are they doing in the polls? Are they a major party? Small? Fringe?

American greens are a small party.

I had the pleasure of marching in a local 4th of July party in support of my friend, who is running for a local county office as the Green Party candidate, but...

the party itself is, ummm, not entirely sensible.

Big gaffe:Cynthia McKinney as Presidential candidate.

Most notable achievement: hitting a capitol police officer for doing his job when he stopped here and asked for identification.

Sigh.

I knew that about the American greens. Realistically the US has only two parties (plus a number of fringe parties). But how about New Zealand? Do the greens have any change of winning and thus be the first country to actively say no to software patents?

The Greens are part of the labor lead coalition in NZ. In Australia they tend to hold the balance of Power in the Senate, and have never been elected into the Lower house.

Okay, so they are big enough to be the deciding vote on proposals but not big enough to push through new proposals?

dinotrac correctly stated:

"the party itself is, ummm, not entirely sensible"

This is true, unfortunately, in the United States and in my state of California. Not because of Cynthia McKinney, though. In a nutshell, Greens in the U.S. would rather fiddle with debate and "parliamentary procedure and process" while the country and world burn.

[This comes from yours truly, the former Liaison to the Secretary of State for the Green Party of California (the equivalent of the state party chair) and the Green Party's Insurance Commissioner candidate in California in 2006.]

Frankly, I got tired of the infighting and I am no longer registered Green. But I can say that what is "sensible" about the Green Party in the U.S. is that they've always been ahead of the curve on FOSS, and they've always had a fairly strong platform plank on its implementation dating back to the '96 Nader campaign.

Meanwhile, it's good to see other Green parties that have some legislative stature in their governments taking up FOSS where it counts. Go, New Zealand Greens.

lcafiero -

I thought it was a good sign that my friend was running for a local office, and yet...

couldn't help wondering why, in 2008, nobody else in the area had.