Attempted summary of questionnaires:

When interviewing four developers at the GUUG/FLOSS telephony conference on behalf of FFII, Benjamin Henrion and Erik Josefsson found that:

Their companies spent an average of 17.5% on R&D. 75% of the interviewees had read patent publications, but none had filed patents or been attacked by patent owners themselves. The developers were aware of patents on g.723.1, g.726, g.728, g.729, h263. 2 vs 1 interviewees considered these patents causing trouble to themselves and others right now, the claims were unanimously (4:0) considered unreasonbale in view of the R&D behind them. Trends among telecom companies to assert such patents aggressively were seen (2:1) and there are many non-producing entities that specialise on patent production and patent rent extraction in the telecom field (2:1, a US telcom's voice mail patent was mentioned twice). Particularly uniform fee only patents (fixed fee for usage) was considered harmful for free software development (4:0), mentioned were Gnomemeeting, H232, asterisk, bayonne and gnomephonei and is was feared that this slowed down the progress of standardisation itself (2:1). Also, defacto standards such g.723.1 licensing cr eates a financial barrier to the market (4:0).

When alluding to a letter in which the CEOs of 5 big telecom equipment companies urged politicians to support software patentability in Europe, only 1 of the 4 had heard of this. It was assumed that the CEOs signed the letter because they tend to trust their patent lawyers (who stand to lose influence if the patent system is curtailed) rather than because these companies would lose substantial revenue if software patents were unenforcable (4:0), also mentioned were the exclusion of small competitors and trade restrictions. Overall, the availability of software patents was seen as a disincentive for R&D investments in the telecom field (4:0), so the developers uniformly (4:0) favored the arliaments' amended version of the directive over the commission's original version of the directive. All developer's companies would like to be listed as a signatory of call for action II of FFII.