How about remembering, that MS are themselves one of the major patent aggressors and proponents of patent arms race?
Every large tech company has a patent portfolio. Hell, Google bought Motorola to get their patent portfolio to use defensively in suits against Android.
In my opinion companies should not be punished for using patents defensively. It's really the only viable option outside of a major legal change. So, I think Microsoft giving other people access to their portfolio for defensive purposes is a good thing. It should _reduce_ the amount of patent litigation.
They also like standards poisoning with their patents, and then collecting money from everyone who is forced to use that. Example - exFAT widely used on SD cards. Why didn't everyone use some free filesystem? Because MS.
When you look on Wikipedia, there are like a dozen goofy file systems that a developer could use for flash storage. They could sort through all that or, you know, they could just use FAT, like everyone has done forever.
I wonder if the open source world's perpetual inability to get behind one standard hurt them there.
If you used any other fs, like f2fs, the ordinary user would insert the card into their computer - and nothing would happen. No, Microsoft is not going to ship alternate filesystems with Windows, when they can use theirs as racket.