[News.eclipse.foundation] [LEGAL] - Scared About Patents!

[ilias <ilias@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Whilst thinking about an highly integrated developement-environment (Collaboration and Governance Infrastructure) many ideas come into my mind. [basicly they are 'lurking around' in my mind since years. Just eclipse is the first system where they become applicable].

I have generally not a problem to share ideas, even if they have the nature of "beeing something new".

Increasing efficiency of some of todays open source collaborative projects would increase their developement throughput, thus in around 2 years i'll get multiple times back what I have 'invested'.

But i am afraid about one issue:

Patents!

If I remember right, there was something about a patent-claim, a simple TODO list.

Seeing that a company patents something similar to "making a shopping list" makes me scary.

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My questions are basicly:

If an idea is published within an open source project, does this automaticly set a patent-relevant "timestamp" for this idea, which prevents other companies from patenting this idea?

Or must one provide specific code for the implementation of an idea (published within an repository)?

I mean, if one provides a really new and good idea, how is it ensured that the contribution is "public" and thus protected from beeing copied and patented by a smart grabbling company?

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I would like to see an foundation like eclipse to inform the contributors clearly about such issues, ideally in an simple to read (example based) document (which links to some more detailed content).

Initially, a pointer to a _compact_ document would help, too.

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