This makes patents sound like what they are. Legalese ammunition.
Sun had a treasure trove of some of the Internet's most valuable patents - ranging from search to microelectronics - so no one in the technology industry could come after us without fearing an expensive counter assault. And there's no defence like an obvious offence
Read the original blog post posted elsewhere in these comments. The Inquirer doesn't deserve more hits for this.
Patents are just ICBMs in the cold war between large corporations. Each corporation stockpiles enough of them that any legal threat will end in mutually assured destruction of all parties involved.
The Inquirer is a terrible rag, as well. They not only copy Schwartz's blog post, they interpret it in cringeworthy ways. Sorry, Steve Jobs had not been "using concurrence so long he forgot what it was called." Concurrence just had graphical effects similar to Keynote, and Schwartz was reminding Jobs that Apple's products had infringed on Sun's patents as well.