[chc]

As I understand it, there are two big reasons they're proposing a boycott, and neither is actually to avoid paying this fee (which most of these guys consider pretty negligible).

Firstly, they're worried about a flood of me-too suits. Immediately stopping use of the feature is sort of a poison pill intended to dissuade patent trolls, who would actually prefer that the developers continue to use the feature and continue to pay up instead of just paying back fees.

Second, Apple is a very conservative company and it takes a lot of time to get them to actually respond to anything. This boycott is intended to make Apple notice faster than they otherwise would. A lot of the boycotters are also filing bugs against the API.