Hartmut Pilch
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Hartmut Pilch (born July 7, 1963 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) founded the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure or FFII, and is a simultaneous conference interpreter, translator and software developer, who lives in Munich, Germany. He is a former employee of SuSE and former president of the FFII.
In 2000, he led a campaign which supposedly contributes to prevent the removal of the exclusion of computer programs as such from patenting in Art. 52(2) of the European Patent Convention. In 2003, he led again a campaign against the patentability of software in Europe. Along with a lot of supporters (60,000?), he lobbied and convinced the members of the European Parliament to amend a directive proposal on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions (initially written by the European Commission). He is also strongly opposed to the current practice of the European Patent Organisation regarding software patents.
He also founded the Eurolinux Alliance.
In November 2005, at the General Assembly of the FFII e. V., Hartmut Pilch stepped aside as president of the FFII, and Pieter Hintjens, CEO of iMatix, was elected the new FFII president. Hartmut Pilch continued on the board as vice-president of FFII and later on, as its treasurer.
Pilch's work as a translator focuses primarily on Chinese and Japanese.[1] He is also a student of Lojban, a constructed language.
