Paul Brown
Managing Director

Linux Magazine is the flagship of Linux New Media and is an international magazine that is published in 6 languages and read all over the world. The magazine contains mostly articles about the use, development and administration of applications which would all infringe, no exceptions, patents belonging to big software corporations.
The application of the directive on computer-implemented inventions would destroy the magazines of the Linux New Media group and would ultimately lead to the closure of the companies which make up the group. The domino effect which would lead to said closure would come about as follows:

• First of all projects developed by independent, non-profit individuals and groups would grind to a stop, as the people who carry them out would not be able to afford the costs, not necessarily of "buying patents" or to pay lawyers to defend them when they infringe patents, but just to research to check they are not infringing somebody else's patents. Projects such as kopete, mplayer, krecipe and nearly all small applications for the KDE and Gnome desktop,as well as these desktops themselves, would disappear. This would leave Linux Magazine without between 60 and 80% of subject matter to write about.
• Second, technologies freely available for development, such as free compilers, IDEs and platforms, would have to stop being free and become proprietary with a price tag attached, so that the development teams that create them could face the costs necessary to defend themselves against infringement accusations. This would force SMEs to move funds that could have been used for development and marketing, to pay for tools that would otherwise have been free. This would destroy 90% of our advertising revenue.
• In the long run, the whole IT area would suffer, forcing the closure of code and the moving funds which were originally aimed at knowledge sharing, towards the legal departments (that do not produce anything) to defend themselves against patent lawsuits. The result would be that there would be no room in the IT marketplace for a secondary product such as Linux Magazine.