It doesn’t affect users here, but it may affect Photoshop users - You’re Gonna Have To Pay To Use Fancy Colors In Photoshop Now
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Interesting 
But, as one of the replies there stated
Pantone does not own a colour,
they own a way of communicating
a certain colour.
So, instead of specifying PMS 300, we will
have to change to #006ec7.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
It’s pretty silly that the two involved parties could not work out a different licensing agreement. Easy to see as a cash grab.
Then again, Pantone is mostly only (?) relevant for physical media, right? And even then it’s not entirely necessary to use it, as long as you can specify CMYK? Or am I missing something?
@Thanatomanic
I believe that you are right re “physical media”,
i.e. offset/intaglio/bookpress printing on some carrier,
like paper. Back in the good old days, the agency specified
what colour/nuance/hue to print that headline in, using
the PMS “name”. If it was to be printed as a spot colour,
the printer ordered that specific ink from an ink company,
if it was to be printed in a CMYK(/MYCK/YMCK/CMY)/whatever-
process, the PMS “name” was decoded into x parts C, x parts M,
x parts Y, and x parts K.
you would of course be better specifying it in CYMK not hex 
Pantone is also useful for colouring matching in manufacturing. If you want your products to all have a consistent colour (eg your brand colour), then you need a way to specify the colour that is not hex or CYMK.
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But isn’t Pantone just a catalog of specific CMYK paint mixes? I have learned a thing today.
However, about 30% of the Pantone system’s 1114 spot colors (as of year 2000) cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (14 including black) mixed in specified amounts, called base colors
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No Pantone are as Claes says specific dyes/paint and not produced by mixing cmyk. Spot colour, as mentioned by Claes, is when the printer loads up a specific colour in the printer. It can then be applied to form a “solid” colour without any dot/screen mixingof different colours. Pantone can also be used outside printing as a similar colour chart as RAL.
Small swerve, we are coming towards the end of renovating our house*. The last step is decorating, while every paint manufacturer has their own name for shades, many of them are based on RAL colours. We have a good local decorator’s merchant in the area who will mix shades to any RAL colour regardless of manufacture or paint type.
- When I say “renovating”, what I actually mean is a complete rewire, new kitchen, new bathrooms. We have also had to replace the old heating system with real central heating, we have fitted an air-source-heat pump. Because the house is Victorian, this has meant improving the insulation and replacing old single-glazed windows with new double- and triple-glazed windows. All this has been made more complicated in that we live in a conservation area, which means we can’t just rip out wooden fittings and replace them with uPVC.
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I saw the article yesterday. It will be painful too for many companies to not pay the new fee. Like @Iain mentioned, pantone colors are selected by human factors/marketing teams as the brand colors. These are then used in every spec across the product, from the plastics, cartons, ads and printed literature. Updating all the specs would be very costly. The conversion to other systems is not perfect mainly for the allowable tolerance in color variations within a pms color (think of chroma and saturation). I see many companies just paying the monthly fee.
Even it’s a bad news, it’s not pitch black. From this page, “three Pantone Color books would remain: Pantone + CMYK coated, Pantone + CMYK uncoated, and Pantone + Metallics Coated.”
I ihave no idea how important these books are in printing. May be some knows better?
Wow… memory lane! I was a graphic designer professionally from 1981 to 1997.* Although that time frame covers the transition to (what was then called) DTP and computer-based design, I still used a lot of layout board, acetate, Amberlith,X-acto blades and so forth before becoming completely computerized. Names / terms like Pantone, Reflex Blue, calendared stock and pre-press stripping haven’t been a part of my vocab for many years.
How much have I forgotten? LOL
* At which point I took a left turn into IT, backups, Avamar, Solaris, Linux and whatnot.