[jedberg]

Many big companies will patent their internal architectures. I've been involved in the creation of quite a few patent applications of exactly that. My name is even on one of them.

It's silly and ridiculous but necessary because of the way patents are enforced.

I can promise you that the existence of the patent system did not motivate us to build any of that software, but it certainly motivated us to patent it after the fact, so that someone else couldn't patent it and then sue us for having independently built the same thing.