Well, there's another issue with software patents that causes me to dislike them. At least from the point of view of the free software world, there are often fe

Well, there's another issue with software patents that causes me to dislike them. At least from the point of view of the free software world, there are often fears that coding some bit of free software will run into a patent that some large company owns and cause problems for that project. It just seems unreasonable from the mindset that you're coding something for the benefit of the world that the world will try to prevent you from using that idea — albeit independently formulated. Regardless of whether these patents work for companies, they certainly don't work for open source software.