The lawsuit started in 2014, Zynga basically flipped off IBM and kept using the patented tech even during litigation, even making more games that use it. It’s not even that they couldn’t use the technology, they just refused to pay the license fees to use it in order to maximize their profit.

I’m a big supporter of FOSS software, but if a company invests billions of dollars to make some technology, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to charge a license for other companies to use it for their own profit