Andreas Koch
acting partner of IWUD GmbH

Though IWUD doesn't sell software at this time, we are affected by software patents. At the one hand we need software, which is adaptable to the requirements of particular projects in short time. Large companies can't schedule such adaption just in time at least not at cost-effective. Therefore we develop some of our tools by ourself and increasingly rely on Free Software, which we adapt and enhance in house.
The directive poses a new risk to our business. We expect to have less and lower quality software available in the future. Therefore it's going to be even harder for us to deliver high quality results and we would have to increases the price of our products.
Furthermore we plan to publish a part of our own software tools as Free Software for public use. We do so, because we expect to achive a higher quality for the tools and a shorter development cycle this way. But we don't have the ressources to assertain, whether or not this software would be affected by software patents. Neither can a small company like ours take the financial risk of posssible patent litigation. If unlimmited patentability was introduced, as the councils current position would, we would have to abstain from publication for the sake of safety. This would bring mischief to all those who work on simillar problems and force them to "reinvent the wheel" over and over again.