FFII has been active on this front since 2000 when, according to the FFII, an attempt to change the European Patent Convention to legitimise software patents failed.
The EuroLinux anti-software-patent petition, supported and promoted by FFII, was signed by more than 1,500 SMEs, many thousand software developers, tens of thousands of software users system administrators as well as a number of scientists, academics and economists for a total of 400,000 signatories.