IMO patents should have mandatory FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory) licensing. With higher (2x?) license fees allowed if a working prototype has been submitted to the patent office instead of just a design.

Incentivize new inventions, but keep profits fair. Incentivize working designs over on-paper ideas. Promote the progress of useful inventions over rent-seeking.

> It was impossible to make singleton in C++ in 200x but atomics was described in literature (even in SICP) and only when patent expired Intel made it everyday tool

I'm curious about what you mean here. Are you taking about an atomic compare and swap operation? I'm sure these have been implemented in processors back as far as the 90s, if not earlier.

Yep, atomics was implemented earlier but, as far as I know, they was patented and only after patent expired Intel put them in. So, how many years it take to "popularize" atomics ? Ten, 20 years ?

I suppose multi-threading wasn't a huge problem for most applications. But I'm not sure how a mutex could ever be properly implemented in a multithreaded environment without an atomic compare and swap, but they've certainly been a thing for a very long time. In terms of atomics as a assembler intrinsic, I think that only became popular when intrinsics started being supported in C compilers, but I doubt the patent was holding that back - unless you know different?

>MS did not manufacture mouses until mouse patend got famous for making no money

MS started making mice in 1983 when they released Word.

And how this detail is relevant to this discussion ?

MS decision to make mice had zero to do with any patents. They simply had no products utilizing them before Word.