Klaus Schmidinger
CTO of CadSoft GmbH

There are a number of attributes CadSoft shares with many other small and medium sized companies: we never used outside capital, we never received government sudsidies, we never reduced our staff and our taxes were as high as about one half of our profit. Companies like that should be the dream of any country. But exactly this type of companies will be extremely endangered by software patents. They normally cannot take unpredictable risks and they don't have their own legal departments. Therefore, they are neither able to profit from registering their own software patents nor can they defend unjustified patent claims of big companies.

Software patents enable big companies to do with smaller companies whatever they like: threaten them, blackmail them, destroy them. This is an unbearable situation not only for existing companies but also for people who think of starting a business.