The point I am most interested in is the unfairness of Red Hat’s expecting a free grant of patent licenses from Microsoft without giving such a free grant in return. Some of Red Hat’s partners also have patents covering software included in the Enterprise version – does Red Hat likewise expect these partners to give it free licenses?

I found Mark Webbink’s general post on patents very informative – all except his speculation on Microsoft’s motivations behind their belated use of software patents (belated compared to Red Hat’s partner IBM, certainly). And I believe, as I’m sure you do, that more discussion of the policies behind software patents and their (often poor) implementations in practice can only lead to better systems.