Soon the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers will again decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many opensource software projects,at least within Europe, because the holders of the over 30,000 alreadygranted "software patents" (currently without a legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for trivial things like "progress bars", "mouseclicks on online order forms", "scrolling within a window" and similar. That way, software developers will have to pay the "software-patentholders" for using these features, even in their own, completely self-developed applications, which can completely stall the development of innovative software for small and medium companies.