At the moment, the End Software Patents project is formally an offshoot of the Free Software Foundation. It also enjoys the “sponsorship” — though not monetary support — of the Software Freedom Law Center, which is led by Eben Moglen (an outside lawyer for the FSF and its former general counsel), and of the Public Patent Foundation, an organization led by the center’s legal director Dan Ravicher. The Software Freedom Law Center is itself funded largely by such Linux-supporting corporate patrons as IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Red Hat (RHT), Novell (NOVL), Oracle (ORCL), and Sun Microsystems (JAVA).

To be sure, the goal of abolishing software patents remains a radical position in the sense that very few corporations endorse it. (A surprising exception is pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co. See here. Evidently Lilly recognizes that poor quality software patents are among the problems spurring the tech industry to seek patent reforms, and it hopes to find of way of placating the tech industry without weakening protections for the drug patents that are the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical industry.)

Though many information technology companies, like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco, are publicly championing patent reform, they only favor improving the quality of software patents, not abolishing them. After all, there are estimated to be more than 200,000 active, issued software patents in the United States, and most major tech companies have acquired, at considerable expense, substantial portfolios of them. Companies like Philips Electronics also argue that drawing the line between hardware and software is no longer easy, and that many patents relate to processes that were once accomplished using hardware but are now accomplished using software. Why should the modernization of the medium deprive Philips of recognition for its inventions, its lawyers have argued (albeit, in a slightly different context). See here.