Toni Müller
CEO of Öko.neT

As a company that takes pride in our technical abilities as engineers, our daily business is already packed with technical work, like debugging other people's systems or software, developing software ourselves, and the like. Since we were always strongly engaged in the free software world, we had early opportunity to taste patent problems which forced incompatibility between applications that should be able to cooperate.

Two early examples were RSA and IDEA which greatly impeded the adoption of trustworthy encryption in the form of PGP around the world because corporate closed-source software wasn't that much interested in the subject while free software wasn't allowed to utilize these algorithms.

Free software increases the user's range of choices. As its developers are not interested in binding users to their products and have a different view on co-working and sharing of knowledge (see below) they often keep the standards better than companies that have to earn money not only for their employees but also for patents and thus try to force their customers to use only their own products to avoid data incompatibility.

For us, getting the aforementioned trade mark registered was a significant hassle which also turned out to be a significant financial burden without immediate ROI. We don't even want to think of having to pay for - real or claimed - patent violations, or for patent applications which are much more costly than registering a trade mark. Instead of competing on the basis of pre-existing bank accounts and accumulated power, we'd like to continue to compete on the basis of technical merit and providing useful solutions to our customers, and on customer satisfaction in general.

At university we learned that free software and its method of sharing knowledge changed the ways of learning, developing and co-working.

We are admittedly "infected" with the classic academic way of competition and cooperation which is extended into real life in the world of free software, where exchange of ideas, eg. on conferences, and cooperation moves forward the entire field.

The effects are at least comparable, if not superior, to the stated, but unmet goal of publishing patent applications, and are, in our opinion, one of the main reasons for the fast development of software during the last years when the advent of free software mitigated what was known as the software crisis in the early eighties. From our point of view, patents will stifle this development and render users stranded with inferiour solutions, unable to afford higher quality or more advanced ones because they can no longer pay the much-increased patent tax.