Is ribbon patented by Microsoft?

Yeah, the patents are a potential issue, which is part of why I carefully didn't say "just implement Microsoft's Ribbon". The point was supposed to be less "implement this specific UX" and more "LO's UX is actually demonstrably very bad for many users, please fix it".

To be clear, I'm fairly sympathetic to Michael and team here: good UX work is very hard; harder still without the data that Microsoft and others now take for granted. But that's really got to be the focus, not quibbling with Apache.