No, you've been living in an echo chamber :-)

Open source enthusiasts may well want to share their work for free (or statistically more likely, use others' work for free), but that's their prerogative. Most companies will not give away their competitive advantage and will seek to protect it anyway they can, and similarly, they are well within their rights to do so.

However, open source seems to be the dominant religion around here. And also you have a lot of Google employees here, and Google is a bit handicapped when it comes to patents at the moment. This is why you hear a disproportionate amount of anti-patent rhetoric. Outside these circles, most engineers are either ignorant about patents or quite proud of their patents.