brainstorming

[bobyrne at iol.ie]

Ben,

Just to clarify your goals, because I find one point confusing:

You said:
>If the patent has not been lodged, but is given away, then it ceases >to
be patentable.

And:
>For example, could we do something to give us protection like the 
>umbrella protection that IBM has given to the Open Source Community, 
>namely; frame the Open Source License to say that any entity making 
>use of any innovations that have their origin in the Open Source 
>Licensed software at hand, which they may use in their proprietary 
>software, simultaneously forego the option of pursuing their own 
>patent rights with respect to any patentable claims used by the Open 
>Source Software. 

ie: you state (correctly, as far as I know) that any innovation released
under an OS license before being patented is not patentable. The OS project
becomes prior art for the innovation, preventing subsequent inventors from
claiming it as their own.
You then ask if it is possible to prevent someone from claiming a patent on
innovations implemented in the OS project. Is the answer not a trivial
'yes'? If you release a project FOO containing innovation BAR and make no
effort to patent BAR, then no-one else can claim BAR as their invention, no
matter how they implement it.

>Benjamin Rossen 
>www.amiculus.com 

Brian O'Byrne.
http://www.iol.ie