It won't be harder, it will be impossible - it destroys the mechanism of Free / Open Source software. The way you put it is as if the rise of FOSS is just some kind of unfortunate minority part of the computing world that will be affected, rather than one of the most important, game changing event in the recent history of computing.

It seems an obvious requirement now to me that any 'international standards', as H.264 is described in TFA, should not be written by a consortium that have a collection of patents on the only possible implementation of the standard!

I'm not sure how this would be ensured - maybe the same consortium that pool the defensive patent pool for Linux could start a standards body based around this simple idea.

...seriously? Will USB 6.0 be super-hyper-megaspeed USB?

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/entrepreneurs/articles/20100518/0844299463.shtml

"The other interesting tidbit, as many noted, is that despite suggestions from some that the "open source" world are folks who "just want stuff for free," the average amount paid by Linux users ($14.52) was significantly higher than those paid by Mac ($10.18) or Windows ($8.05) users."

Humble Indie Bundle - so many Linux gamers bought this that several of the titles in it were even open sourced! This is where the Linux gamers have been shown to be supportive and vote with their wallets when native games are released. Who needs Steam - not me!

What are these kiosks of the inter-net you speak of?
Why, here in blighty the modern mode of communication is the telegraph, which we run using steam, dontyouknow!

The MIT License is a free software license

Haiku is free, as in speech. That adds to its meaningfulness quite a bit I think.

I care, as does anyone who remembers operating systems that were responsive to user interaction first and foremost

I feel in full control of BeOS and Haiku (also AmigaOS) and there's a lot of things that it gets right that Windows, Mac and Linux still fail to do between them. There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..