Indemnification from lawsuits is a big deal to many companies, especially when you develop a core application for an OS only to see that OS possibly taken away. This is happening to major companies all the time. Everybody likes to sue MS because they will probably pay off the suing party just to shut them up. Check out Novell, as that's been the only real income they have seen in a long time. With MS products, indemnification is not an issue, even if you have a million machines. Once the legal ownership of these stupid patents is done, you will see a giant leap forward in technology development for Linux (assuming that it works out). This is what large scale environments want to see, and these environments are what drives development.