Koen Martens
CEO of Sonologic

The simple reality is that when software patents become legal in europe, my business will cease to exist. For our hosting activities we depend greatly on open source software, giving back to the community by fixing bugs and releasing our own tools as open source. When software patents become legal, open source will be something of the past, requiring us to invest thousands of euro's in licensed, proprietary software to do what open source software is doing for us now. The net result, a large increase in the prices we must ask from our customers.

We can not yet pay for a team of lawyers and patent-checking agents to make sure we are not infringing on some patent. Large companies do have the money to invest in building a patent portfolio to fight of infringement claims, smaller promising start-ups like Sonologic can not manage this, and are at the mercy of the patent sharks.

Finally, the kind of frivolous software patents that are being granted lately acknowledges ones greatest fear: that for 10 lines of code you write, there are at least 20 patents infringed. If software patents are legalized, I will have to pay licensing costs for those 20 patents. Everyone can understand that prices will sky-rocket. This will make the choice between contracting locally with companies like mine or off-shoring to India even less hard, killing the business climate in our own neighbourhoud.

Concluding, there are some serious problems with software patents as they are described now, that will simply kill my business. I therefore sincerely hope the voice of us smaller (non-multinational, non-american) but ubiquitous companies are also heared by the powers-that-be, and that software patents in their current form will go down as a failed thought-experiment.