The title should perhaps say "... sent in 1994". (I don't think any of it is any less applicable now than it was then, though.)
Yes because enough people were not pissed off. This is changing now (sort-of-kind-of-maybe-is) because a company like Red-Hat was ticked off well enough. I give the current movement a 30% chance of success and a 80% chance of a success with no real good impact that was intended by something like this letter.
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then they have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2007/03/analysis-micros...