On: The inventor of microfleece refused to patent it.

[_tggb]

As vidar mentioned in a different thread of this story[1], prior art plays a large part in this process.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1797836

[blahedo → _tggb]

But prior art doesn't have the viral effects of the GNU licence. This would be an actual patent, but with licensing terms that required anyone creating derivatives to either release them or to patent them under comparably-free terms.