Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

The problem is lawyers will take advantage of any loophole.

Imho patenting software is an abuse of patent law. The GPL is supposed to be a copyright licence (patents shouldn't even enter into it!). Yet it's got a load of patent language in there, simply to fix a legal problem that shouldn't exist!

So yes, there is a lot of stuff in the GPL that shouldn't be there. But it's there because it's needed :-(

Cheers,
Wol