Patents do not apply to academic research, do they? Amateurs can also post some VHDL on github without fear of retribution, so still strange. For commercial ap

Patents do not apply to academic research, do they? Amateurs can also post some VHDL on github without fear of retribution, so still strange. For commercial application, if the ideas are good, and the patents valid, someone could just license them. Or are they sitting on an inbox full of desperate licensing requests that they're ghosting while whining they can't get funding?