Late comment here — “Windows” is not patented. Nor is World of Warcraft. Nor is the iPhone. Each of these makes use of technologies that the appropriate companies have under patent, but none of them is patented of themselves. What they are mostly protected by is copyright. And copyright is absolutely integral to Open Source, both software and hardware — it’s what gives open licences their protection.
(A copyright applies to a work, a patent applies to an invention. In either case, it’s a government-granted monopoly for a (theoretically) limited time, and the intent in either case is to enrich the public good.)
(As for what Microsoft has patents for that it’s getting money from Android phone manufacturers, see http://androidcommunity.com/barnes-noble-reveals-microsofts-android-patents-in-detail-20111114/ ; at a glance, it’s a lot of old patents that should mostly be invalidated by prior art. The real force here comes when a company with deep pockets decides to lean on you and say, effectively, “That’s a much better product than we could ever make! So give us millions of dollars. Oh, and if you don’t want to be blackmailed like this, we can go to the courts, where you’ll need to spend millions of dollars defending yourselves, and then give us millions of dollars because we have more lawyers than the population of Wyoming.”)
