🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <sean.649630909@s.ms.uky.edu>, sean@ms (Sean Casey) writes:
>butcher@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Lawrence Butcher) writes:
>|It might be
>|a good idea for people to post hare-brained ideas about software to this
>|forum so that the idea will become unpatentable.
>
>I think this might be an *excellent* idea. Perhaps the LPF could start
>collecting and publishing a list of "thought of before" ideas, categorized
>by subject area.

It seems to me that the publication, dissemination, and indexing of
technical information is just what the traditional academic/scholarly press
is for.  USENET isn't really good, since it's not archived in the
traditional ways.  Write your ideas up and send them to the journals.
Since we're doing this just to ensure the ideas are free, not to
gain "publish or perish" credit, the right target would be "unrefereed"
journals like the ACM's SIG newsletters.

BTW, *IBM*, of all things, has taken this tack for years.  They don't
want to patent everything (solely because patent applications are expensive,
not from any idea of freedom of information), but they want to make
sure nobody comes along later and patents the idea.  So they have
a big thick monthly publicly-available journal, the "IBM Technical
Disclosure Bulletin", which is just chock full of little write-ups
of ideas.  If somebody comes along later with a patent, IBM just
says, "We thought of that in 1958... see TDB item 91813.. G'bye."

Rich