My favorite tech has a handful of patents expired in the past two years. But they are written in a way that doesn't expose the underlying algorithms, just the "steps" which seems to be a very keen well-designed patent informed by lawyers. Designed to the letter of the law. Mitsubisi Research Laboratories funded the work, it's clear they wanted to protect their investment. The text inside the patent is this absurd abstraction of the algorithm such that it could apply to anything.

Software patents exist in this space where the patent holder gets the best of both worlds: they get to argue that an infringer nebulously infringes on the ambiguous "steps". Meanwhile the source code is not in the patent, therefore protected from public eyes. Patents should require exposing the source code.