Sure, it’s a way for proprietary software authors to deduplicate efforts and share IP, one they tend to prefer over paying vendors who are trying to extract their own rents, and one they can pull off because they are already competent to write and operate their own software. In an alternative history, the tech community would all be paying small fees to license each other’s patents. What open source is is closer to what the patent system was supposed to be, than some kind of end-user empowerment revolution.
