The patent shouldn't last that long – a patent should protect the technology in about 5 years, after that the technology should be freely available to everybody who want to use it. Adobe Paragraph Composer is much, much older than that (it is ca 15 years old. Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer is slightly younger [perhaps 12 years old]). Edit: the HZ algorithm patent expired in 2010! according to Wikipedia. Regarding Knuth-Plass algorithm: You can't copyright a method or algorithm, but you can patent a method or algorithm. The Knuth-Plass algorithm patent is also expired nowadays.
Besides, I wish that Affinity Publisher will be world ready from scratch. That will benefit all users, including scientific area where they often take upp source texts in foreign languages, for instance hebrew, arabic, ancient greek etc. It is much easier to support multi language (including LtR and RtL) from scratch than adding afterwords (Adobe had some serious problem for years when they added Hebrew and Arabic into InDesign afterwards (bugs that was very difficult to track etc).
Adobe still have some serious issue with Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer:
Combining Adobe-World Ready Paragraph Composer with Story function (problem with hyphenated words).
If you only use Adobe Paragraph Composer together with Story function, then it works very well…