Yes but: - There is no legal viable way to upgrade to v3, even if the "or later" clause would be there it would have been a legal disaster. - It's also makes

Yes but: - There is no legal viable way to upgrade to v3, even if the "or later" clause would be there it would have been a legal disaster. - It's also makes it much more viable to upstream drivers in Linux - Let's be honest the patent system is by now utter garbage failing the one fundamental thing it was invented for: Driving/Improving Innovation. The only reason it didn't fall on our head yet is because many companies simple don't enforce patents. Also you could argue it already fell on our head in some areas due to innovation having slowed to a crawl, while certain competitions (mostly in Asia) are not affected as they ignore patents. I mean sharing and cloning software (between companies!) is what enabled us to have massive innovations (through some maybe stupid) in software space. Non of this would have been possible with enforced software patents.