Bert Bril
Head R&D of dGB

From day one, when our company started with only 2 persons we have spent about 50% of the company's income on R&D. Now we have grown to 10 times that size, we are still spending half on R&D. Of this budget, almost 100% is truly spent on R&D, because from day one we have chosen not to patent any of our many highly innovative solutions. Not choosing that strategy would have certainly meant diverting a significant portion of our innovative capacity to monitoring and applying for patents and all the legal support around it.

Over the years, we have had a few encounters with the patent system. The first encounter was when a company wanted to take over our company for a ridiculously low amount of money. At the same time they threatened to enforce their patent on a technology we developed ourselves but which they had patented. Some of us would call this blackmail. Very fortunately, we had written proof of prior usage. A few years later, we had to cooperate applying for a patent on another technology we developed in cooperation with a large oil company. This was done as a 'defensive' patent. This company now routinely applies for patents because of bad earlier experiences where they had to abandon technology they developed themselves - just because of patents.

Software patents are a threat to innovation. In many areas, straightforward advancement is simply blocked by disgustingly trivial patents. The result is that we are all spending a lot of extra time to work around potential patent infringements. All in all software patents are not showing us the way ahead to become more innovative, on the contrary they block natural advancement almost everywhere.

Our motto is: if they copy us, we'd better make sure we're already a few steps ahead. That's difficult if you're trying to run with heavy patent weights.