"The issue here is Software Patents exist." And I can tell you, as a person who was out there fighting this for one of these companies, that it was very lonely

"The issue here is Software Patents exist." And I can tell you, as a person who was out there fighting this for one of these companies, that it was very lonely, and still is. I can tell you that when i've been out there fighting the good fight, people like MS have been actively opposed to changing the status quo (as has pretty much every other software industry company except possibly newegg :P) They don't always come out and say it publicly, but they do so privately for sure. Why do you believe nothing has changed? Do you really think if companies representing many hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue went to congress and said "fix this" they wouldn't? Certainly big pharma does everything they can to block it[1], but these industries are now worth about the same (~400 billion worldwide as of a few years ago). It's really because there is no unified front in the software industry, but there is in pharma, etc. This is one of the reasons i gave up and let it go further to crap - even if you were to publicly expose everyone's hypocrisy, it wouldn't change anything (the population they care about writ large just doesn't give a crap), and until these companies actually care about changing anything, nothing will happen. [1] They want zero change because it's safer. You could say "software patents are special and expire in 5 years", but then what's to say the the next step isn't "pharma patents are special"