Good post/thoughts. I'll throw in one thing: IF the ring oscillator didn't work without tweaking, who did the tweaking? Answer- Employees of one of the patent holders! And as employees, it's likely they had no rights to anything they did on company time in company facilities.

And, in my feeble mind, there's still the issue of timing of all these events. Other companies got the thing to work (e.g., Intel), probably before our PTSC guys even even tried. And if they did "tweaking", they apparently didn't patent the tweaks.

JMHO,

SGE