If I could go back in time, I would make a much more serious effort to encourage people I did business with that software patents are a bad idea and that they s

If I could go back in time, I would make a much more serious effort to encourage people I did business with that software patents are a bad idea and that they should always insist on software for which they have sufficient source code to always allow them to legally maintain their systems without involving the original vendor. To me that means it has to either be open source from the start or have a license that would guarantee an eventual open source release (i.e. along the lines of aladdin ghostscript).