Eastern Europe

For the new Eastern European member states of the EU, the negative implications of legalized software patents would be particularly hurtful. Software patents would deprive those countries of major opportunities.

Affordable and innovative software are key requirements for the Eastern European economies to grow and prosper. In order to reach Western European income levels, Eastern Europe has a strategic need for fostering the use of information technologies. Relative to the current income levels in Eastern Europe, the cost of computer software is even higher than in the West.

The problem of higher relative costs is even bigger for the cost of patenting. The cost of a European patent is approximately 30,000 Euros, and software companies need a very large number of patents for defensive purposes. Eastern European countries would shoot into their own foot by supporting a patent system that adds a huge and counterproductive layer of cost to software development. Copyright law, which protects every developer at no incremental cost, is much better positioned to enable bright minds in Eastern Europe to develop software for their own markets and the entire internal market of the EU.

The Eastern European member states of the EU don't have traditional industry giants like Germany or Sweden. In the long run, the net effect of software patents is negative to each and every European country, no matter how many large companies it has. It is even negative in the United States where the Federal Trade Commission has voiced major concerns. However, in a country with some global players like Siemens, there is a lot of pressure by lobbyists for broad patentability, and they sometimes succeed to lead their national governments to wrong choices. It's hard to see why smaller countries with differently structured economies would have to follow others on the wrong track. The more a country is a software importer rather than exporter, the less it makes sense to push for any legislation that makes it harder for newcomers to enter the market, and that only serves to make software more costly and less innovative.

The strategic relevance of open source applies to Eastern Europe even more than to the West. Apart from cost considerations, which are not exclusively a matter of open source, there are two reasons why open-source software is particularly beneficial to Eastern Europe. The first is that a significant number of open-source developers are Eastern Europeans. For instance, a large part of the software development staff of MySQL is based in Eastern Europe, not because the company specifically recruited there but simply by virtue of those people having contributed, over the Internet, to open-source projects. Another aspect is that some of the Eastern European languages represent relatively small markets. While only a few software vendors translate their software into such languages, there is typically always some open-source developer in each country who will sooner or later translate an open-source program, even if it is used by a very limited number of people who speak the respective language. Closed-source software doesn't come with that freedom.