Software patents: Entrepreneurs accuse Union of "electoral fraud":
Entrepreneurial initiatives from several federal states warn in an open letter (PDF) the CDU and CSU members of the European Parliament against "committing systematic electoral fraud" and "causing entrepreneurial misjudgments (...)." The Union should finally admit that it is closer to Microsoft than to the German middle class.
One trigger was SAP:
The Walldorf-based SAP AG recently placed full-page ads in EU magazines urging the proposed directive. SAP demands "patent protection (...) for innovations in IT, as created by SAP (...)." However, these innovations lie exclusively in the software sector. SAP software is used for accounting, order processing, and financial reporting. The SAP ad mentions the term "business processes" (between companies and within) three times.
Of course, the Justice Ministry sees this massive incompetence quite differently and still claims that pure software patents are not possible - even though reality has long since said otherwise. And so we (open-source programmers as well as medium-sized software companies) are being sacrificed on the altar of the software industry - which then politely thanks with greater job cuts and relocation of software production to countries outside the EU.
What a mess