It’s a long process, MySQL CEO, Marten Mickos, told ComputerWire, noting that the draft proposal was created in May while the European Parliament delayed voting on the proposal in September. It looks like they will not proceed with that, he said. But of course there are large patent lobbyists as well.

Uppsala, Sweden-based MySQL is one of the backers of NoSoftwarePatents.com, which has campaigned against the proposed changes and this week claimed that the Polish Government’s decision means they are now dead.

According to NoSoftwarePatents.com, the directive no longer has enough support to be officially adopted due to new vote weighting that took effect in the EU this month.

The Polish Government took its stance against the proposal following meetings between officials and representatives of Microsoft, Novell and Sun Microsystems that confirmed the proposed directive makes all software potentially patentable.

Poland did not rule out support for software patents completely, but did dismiss the text of the proposed changes that were accepted by the EU Council of Ministers in May 2004.

Because of numerous ambiguity and contradictions respecting the current directive project, Poland cannot support the text which was accepted in the vote of the Council on 18 may 2004, the Polish Government’s statement read.

Simultaneously Poland definitely is for unambiguous regulations which would guarantee that computer-implemented inventions would be patentable. But beyond any doubt a computer program or portions thereof will not be patentable, it continued.

MySQL’s Mickos said that the company had seen a change in attitude towards patents in Europe. The fresh thing we see is that people now understand the issues, he said. NoSoftwarePatents.com has been very successful in making European politicians understand the reality of the situation.

Mickos added that people were also now understanding that opposition to software patents is not about a religious open source opposition to intellectual property. Our position is based on ownership and copyright, he said. We have rationally come to the conclusion that software patents are not the right way to protect innovation.

This is not a religious war but for us there is no rational reason for software patents, Mickos added. This is factual, not religious or political. This is a movement by profit generating businesses. We have tried to demonstrate that open source is commercially viable and we take rational decisions and I think we have proved that.

As well as MySQL, NoSoftwarePatents.com is also backed by Linux vendor Red Hat Inc and web hosting firm 1&1 Internet Inc, while Novell Inc also recently voiced its opposition to the proposed changes to European software patent laws.

While Poland’s decision marks it out as the country that most impacted the proposed software patent changes, it is not alone in its opposition. Spain originally voted against the proposal while Italy, Austria, and Belgium abstained.

Meanwhile other countries that initially voted for the proposal have had second thoughts. In July the Dutch parliament passed a resolution that its government change the position of the Netherlands from support to abstention, while in October all four groups in the German parliament spoke out against software patents and the proposed legislation.

The proposal has been at the center of fierce debate among European politicians, with the European Parliament attempting to retain restriction of software patents in the directive and the Council of Ministers taking a more lenient line.

Poland had initially abstained from the May 2004 vote having stated that its votes were irrelevant as the votes of countries supporting the proposal were enough to take it above the qualifying majority, while even with Poland’s votes against the proposal there would not be enough to create a blocking minority.

The weighting attributed to country votes has now changed, however, and under the new weighting the ‘yes votes’ no longer carry enough weight to create a qualified majority.

The Polish decision does not mean that changes to EU software patent rules will not be made, but it does mean that amendments proposed by the European Parliament that would disallow software patents now have a much greater chance to be proposed and discussed.