Not really, when you consider that the vast majority of will take the path of least resistance, and that innovation is often a risky and expensive effort most w

Not really, when you consider that the vast majority of will take the path of least resistance, and that innovation is often a risky and expensive effort most would rather eschew. There are many examples of innovation-by-forced-workaround happening. Consider the fact that development of Ogg Vorbis languished until the MP3 patents started getting licensed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis). This kicked the Ogg Vorbis project into overdrive, resulting in a format and codec that many consider superior to MP3. Here's another example, from Stallman himself: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html - he recounts an example of where they had to work around the LZW patents, resulting in GZIP, which "gave better compression results". This further eventually led to the creation of PNG when the GIF patent was asserted. The clear implication, of course, is that they'd have preferred re-using LZW (as all good coders should), but then they would not have invented GZIP and PNG.