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Public Patents?
Lettuce asks: "While driving along today, I was mulling over patents. One of the problems with patents, from an open source perspective, is they cost money to acquire. Not only do you have to pay the Patent Office for them, you usually need to obtain the services of some lawyer. Which means you'll usually never see someone patent an idea just so that it can be public domain. What if we lobby our congressmen and senators to wave the charges for patents and even provide patent assistance, for those of us who would patent an idea for the public. With that simple change, couldn't people could flood the patent office with simple ideas and prevent abusers from patenting obvious ideas such as 'delivering e-mail to a wireless device'?"
if you had RTFA you would have... oh wait....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It's funny, the reason to patent someting is pretty much the exact opposite of what you people want to use it for. Patents are for when a person or company spends their time and/or money to design and build something that has NEVER been made before, that they keep their IP, so that some one else doesn't profit from their work. All of the stuff you OSS guys are talking about, shareing knowleage and everything, is the exact opposite. I hate to say this but some of you guys sound like a bunch of hippies, and that doesn't do any good for anyone. If your really worried about what you are working on and want it to becme public domain very cheaply, stick a copy of everythig into an envelope and mail it to your self, that way if a company tries to claim if for their own sue them and pull out the postmarked envelope as evidence and bam, thats all the proof any judge will need. OSS is great but it will never be main stream, it will always be on the fringes of it, when you can make a piece of software that even an 80 year old grandmother that can only types with 2 fingers, then maybe you have a chance, but you still need good marketing. Then again OSS people don't really want everyone to use the same software as them, but who would want to use the same software as your grand mother?