Z:gnu-www-ja-patent-practice-panel--13d0a4-But in fact they had, because/en

But in fact they had, because if someone sues a user of Microsoft software, Microsoft has built in the cost of stepping in to defend them from that into the cost of the license fee. On the other side, if you have royalty-free distributed software such as open-source or free software, you can't bake in the cost of that risk so it becomes more transparent. And this makes consumers or users think that open-source is in a worse position than proprietary software when it's actually not. It's just because the open-source distribution scheme does not allow someone to sneak in the cost of that risk to make it opaque instead of transparent. So the patent system not only prefers large developers over small developers, it also prefers users of proprietary software over open-source software.