Terje Laugerud
CEO of CIBER Europe

Having 1200 consultants designing and writing millions of lines of code and thousands of software processes each year, software patents will simply be counter productive and counter innovative. I am very concerned about a future, governed by software patents, where we as a service vendor will be asked by customers to guarantee we have not broken or violated any software patents before we hand over a bespoke solution.

From our experience in many projects we know that people in the software business do not want patents. The economics of the software business is different from classical hardware industries, as are the results of the patenting process. Many people in the hardware industries seem to have become used to the notion that you can be sued because someone else found a solution before you. In the software business this kind of game rule is not accepted. The patent system has had a chance for about 20 years to produce something acceptable in the area of software, and it has failed miserably. The problems have become only worse over time. The EU Council was called on to solve these problems, but they decided to hide behind the European Patent Office, in other words behind the very people who are responsible for the failure in Europe.

Our hope now lies in the European Parliament. The rapporteur Michel Rocard has provided good leadership, his colleagues only need to support him, so that the Council can get another chance to address the problems.