The one main reason ECC was not adopted initially is also patents. Certicom held a majority of the patents on those and every time I tried to push for elliptic

The one main reason ECC was not adopted initially is also patents. Certicom held a majority of the patents on those and every time I tried to push for elliptic curves the first thing every one talked about was patents. So we mostly stayed away from it to avoid any issues later on. One other reason is Openssl did not implement support for them until recently (a few years ago), probably because of the patent confusion. It will pick up in a few years.