The trouble with OpenBTS

Agreed completely. For a distribution based in a jurisdiction where someone actively tries to ban some freedoms through patent claims, or for a distribution backed by sponsors that are easy targets for evil patent trolls this is a very serious problem.

But you shouldn't hold that against such a distribution. They are just forced to not distribute some Free Software that others can and will happily distribute to their users. That doesn't make such a distribution less free. It just means they ship a different selection of free software out of necessity.