You may be right and can argue all you want. It is utterly meaningless in the real world sadly. What you are saying is how the patent system should work, but ca

You may be right and can argue all you want. It is utterly meaningless in the real world sadly. What you are saying is how the patent system should work, but cannot. You are leaving out the human factors that ruin it. All it takes is someone to sue you for use of your novel use of an existing idea and you are dead in the water despite it being valid. Most small companies let alone open source communities have no legal resource to defend themselves even if they are demonstrably in the right. This is all precisely why it shouldn't not be possible to patent minor abstract symbolic expressions of basic human problem solving. It's like suing a child for learning how to walk for having a patent on walking. Simultaneous invention is normal and healthy.