Is it fair to patent workarounds?

Question

While developing a FAT32 driver for my bootloader, I thought to make it complete by adding the long file name support.
While watching around for some specification, and I also found articles about Microsoft suing for infringement of their patents on something that basically is a workaround.
Knowing about this events made me think: is it fair to patent things that are workarounds?

Answer 1

If a solution to a problem is a workaround or not is often just a matter of viewpoint. And to find a good workaround for a problem is sometimes not easy and may need a whole lot of intellectual work, not necessarily less than a "straightforward" or "uncompromising" solution. So assumed software patents would be any kind of fair (which I strongly deny!), I don't see why patents for "workarounds" should be less fair than for other "non-workarounds".